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COPYREGHT DEPOSITS 



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JOURNEYS To BAGDAD 



JOURNEYS 
To BAG DAD 

DY C NAMES 
S-BIVCOKS 

ILLUSTRATED WITH 
ORIGINAL WcPD'CUTS 

BY ALLEN 

LEWIS- 




YALE UNIVERSITY PdESS 
NEW HAVEN CONNECTICUT 

M D CCCC XV 



163 



/^ 






Copyright, 1915, by 
Yalk University Press 



First printed November, 1915, 1000 copies 



PUBLISHERS' NOTE 

The Yale University Press makes grateful acknowledgment to 
the Editors of the Yale Review and of the New Republic for per- 
mission to include m the present work essays of which they were 
the original publish e'rs. 



QEC I 1915 

©G1.A416673 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Journeys to Bagdad .... 1 

II. The Worst Edition of Shakespeare . . 23 

III. The Decline of Night-Caps . . . 43 

IV. Maps and Rabbit-Holes . . . .55 
V. Tunes for Spring ..... 69 

VI. Respectfully Submitted — -To a Mournful Air . 83 

VII. The Chilly Presence of Hard-headed Persons . 91 

VIII. Hoopskirts and Other Lively Matter . . 101 

IX. On Traveling 115 

X. Through the Scuttle with the Tinman . . 125 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/journeystobagdadOObroo 



JOURNEYS To BAGDAD 



L 




JOURNEYS To BAGDAD 



Are you of that elect who, at certain seasons of 
the year — perhaps in March when there is timid 
promise of the spring or in the days of October when 
there are winds across the earth and gorgeous panic 
of fallen leaves — are you of that elect who, on such 
occasion or any occasion else, feel stirrings in you to 
be quit of whatever prosy work is yours, to throw 
down your book or ledger, or your measuring tape — 
if such device marks your service — and to go forth 
into the world? 

I do count myself of this elect. And I will name 
such stimuli as most set these stirrings in me. And 
first of all there is a smell compounded out of hemp 
and tar that works pleasantly to my undoing. Now 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



it happens that there is in this city, down by the river 
where it flows black with city stain as though the toes 
of commerce had been washed therein, a certain ship 
chandlery. It is filthy coming on the place, for there 
is reek from the river and staleness from the shops — 
ancient whiffs no wise enfeebled by their longevity, 
Nestors of their race with span of seventy lusty 
summers. But these smells do not prevail within the 
chandlery. At first you see nothing but rope. 
Besides clothesline and other such familiar and 
domestic twistings, there are great cordages scarce 
kinsmen to them, which will later put to sea and will 
whistle with shrill enjoyment at their release. There 
are such hooks, swivels, blocks and tackles, such 
confusion of ships' devices as would be enough for 
the building of a sea tale. It may be fancied that 
here is Treasure Island itself, shuffled and laid apart 
in bits like a puzzle-picture. (For genius, maybe, 
is but a nimbleness of collocation of such hitherto 
unconsidered trifles.) Then you will go aloft where 
sails are made, with sailormen squatting about, 
bronzed fellows, rheumatic, all with pipes. And 
through all this shop is the smell of hemp and tar. 

In finer matters I have no nose. It is ridiculous, 
really, that this very messenger and forerunner of 
myself, this trumpeter of my coming, this bi-nasal 
fellow in the crow's-nest, should be so deficient. If 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



smells were bears, how often I would be bit! My 
nose may serve by way of ornament or for the sniffing 
of the heavier odors, yet will fail in the nice detection 
of the fainter waftings and olfactory ticklings. Yet 
how will it dilate on the Odyssean smell of hemp and 
tar! And I have no explanation of this, for I am 
no sailor. Indeed, at sea I am misery itself when- 
ever perchance "the ship goes wop (with a wiggle 
between)." Such wistful glances have I cast upon 
the wide freedom of the decks when I leave them on 
the perilous adventure of dinner! So this relish of 
hemp and tar must be a legacy from a far-off time — 
a dim atavism, to put it as hard as possible — for I 
seem to remember being told that my ancestors were 
once engaged in buccaneering or other valiant liveli- 
hood. 

But here is a peculiar thing. The chandlery gives 
me no desire to run away to sea. Rather, the smell 
of the place urges me indeterminately, diffusedly, to 
truantry. It offers me no particular chart. It but 
cuts my moorings for whatever winds are blowing. 
If there be blood of a pirate in me, it is a shame what 
faded juice it is. It would flow pink on the sticking. 
In mean contrast to skulls, bowie-knives and other 
red villainy, my thoughts will be set toward the mild 
truantry of trudging for an afternoon in the country. 
Or it is likely that I'll carry stones for the castle that 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



I have been this long time building. Were the trick 
of prosody in me, I would hew a poem on the spot. 




JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



Such is my anemia. And yet there is a touch of 
valiancy, too, as from the days when my sainted 
ancestors sailed with their glass beads from Bristol 
harbor; the desire of visiting the sunset, of sailing 
down on the far side of the last horizon where the 
world itself falls off and there is sky with swirl of 
stars beyond. 

In the spring of each year everyone should go to 
Bagdad — not particularly to Bagdad, for I shall not 
dictate in matter of detail— but to any such town that 
may happen to be so remote that you are not sure 
when you look it up whether it is on page 47 which 
is Asia, or on page 53 which is Persia. But Bagdad 
will serve: For surely. Reader, you have not for- 
gotten that it was in Bagdad in the surprising reign 
of Haroun-al-Raschid that Sinbad the Sailor lived! 
Nor can it have escaped you that scarce a mule's 
back distance — such was the method of computation 
in those golden days — lived that prince of medieval 
plain-clothes men, Ali Baba! 

Historically, Bagdad lies in that tract of earth 
where purple darkens into night. Geographically, 
it lies obliquely downward, and is, I compute, consid- 
erably off the southeast corner of my basement. It 
is such distant proximity, doubtless, that renders my 
basement — and particularly its woodpile, which lies 
obscurely beyond the laundry — such a shadowy, grim 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



and altogether mysterious place. If there be any 
part of the house, including certain dark corners of 
the attic, that is fearfully Mesopotamian after night- 
fall, it is that woodpile. Even when I sit above, 
secure with lights, if by chance I hear tappings from 
below — such noises are common on a windy night — 
I know that it is the African Magician pounding for 
the genie, the sound echoing through the hollow earth. 
It is matter of doubt whether the iron bars so usual 
on basement windows serve chiefly to keep burglars 
out, or whether their greater service is not their 
defense of western Christianity against the invasion 
from the East which, except for these bars, would 
enter here as by a postern. At a hazard, my suspicion 
would fall on the iron doors that open inwards in the 
base of chimneys. We have been fondly credulous 
that there is nothing but ash inside and mere siftings 
from the fire above; and when, on an occasion, we 
reach in with a trowel for a scoop of this wood-ash 
for our roses, we laugh at ourselves for our scare of 
being nabbed. But some day if by way of experiment 
you will thrust your head within — it's a small hole and 
you will be besmirched beyond anything but a Satur- 
day's reckoning — you will see that the pit goes off in 
darkness — downward. It was but the other evening 
as we were seated about the fire that there came 
upward from the basement a gibbering squeak. Then 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



the woodpile fell over, for so we judged the clatter. 
Is it fantastic to think that some dark and muffled 
Persian, after his dingy tunneling from the banks of 
the Tigris, had climbed the pile of wood for a breath 
of night at the window and, his foot slipping, the pile 
fell over? Plainly, we heard him scuttling back to 
the ash-pit. 

Be these things as they may, when you have 
arrived in Bagdad — and it is best that you travel over 
land and sea — if you be serious in your zest, you will 
not be satisfied, but will journey a thousand miles 
more at the very least, in whatever direction is 
steepest. And you will turn the flanks of seven 
mountains, with seven villainous peaks thereon. For 
the very number of them will put a spell on you. 
And you will cross running water, that you leave no 
scent for the world behind. Such journey would be 
the soul of truantry and you should set out upon the 
road every spring when the wind comes warm. 

Now the medieval pilgrimage in its day, as you 
very well know, was a most popular institution. And 
the reasons are as plentiful as blackberries. But in 
the first place and foremost, it came always in the 
spring. It was like a tonic, iron for the blood. 
There were many men who were not a bit pious, who, 
on the first warm day when customers were scarce, 
yawned themselves into a prodigious holiness. Who, 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



indeed, would resign himself to changing moneys or 
selling doves upon the Temple steps when such 
appeal was in the air? What cobbler even, bent upon 
his leather, whose soul would not mount upon such 
a summons? Who was it preached the first crusade? 
There was no marvel in the business. Did he come 
down our street now that April's here, he would win 
recruits from every house. I myself would care little 
whether he were Christian or Mohammedan if only 
the shrine lay over-seas and deep within the twistings 
of the mountains. 

If, however, your truantry is domestic, and the 
scope of the seven seas with glimpse of Bagdad is 
too broad for your desire, then your yearning may 
direct itself to the spaces just outside your own town. 
If such myopic truantry is in you, there is much to 
be said for going afoot. In these days when motors 
are as plentiful as mortgages this may appear but 
discontented destitution, the cry of sour grapes. And 
yet much of the adventuring of life has been gained 
afoot. But walking now has fallen on evil days. 
It needs but an enlistment of words to show its 
decadence. Tramp is such a word. Time was when 
it signified a straight back and muscular calves and 
an appetite, and at nightfall, maybe, pleasant gossip 
at the hearth on the affairs of distant villages. There 
was rhythm in the sound. But now it means a loafer, 

10 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



a shuffler, a wilted rascal. It is patched, dingy, out- 
at-elbows. Take the word vagabond! It ought to 
be of innocent repute, for it is built solely from stuff 
that means to wander, and wandering since the days 
of Moses has been practiced by the most respectable 
persons. Yet Noah Webster, a most disinterested 
old gentleman, makes it clear that a vagabond is a 
vicious scamp who deserves no better than the lockup. 




Doubtless Webster, if at home, would loose his dog 
did such a one appear. A wayfarer, also, in former 
times was but a goer of ways, a man afoot, whether 
on pilgrimage or itinerant with his wares and cart 
and bell. Does the word not recall the poetry of the 
older road, the jogging horse, the bush of the tavern, 
the crowd about the peddler's pack, the musician 



11 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



piping to the open window, or the shrine in the 
hollow? Or maybe it summons to you a decked and 
painted Cambyses bellowing his wrath to an inn-yard. 




One would think that the inventor of these scandals 
was a crutched and limping fellow, who being himself 
stunted and dwarfed below the waist was trying to 
sneer into disuse all walking the world over, or one 



12 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



who was paunched by fat living beyond carrying 
power, larding the lean earth, fearing lest he sweat 
himself to death, some Falstaff who unbuttons him 
after supper and sleeps on benches after noon. 
Rather these words should connote the strong, the 
self-reliant, the youthful. He is a tramp, we should 
say, who relies most on his own legs and resources, 
who least cushions himself daintily against jar in his 
neighbor's tonneau, whose eye shines out seldomest 
from the curb for a lift. The wayfarer must go forth 
in the open air. He must seek hilltop and wind. 
He must gather the dust of counties. His prospects 
must be of broad fields and the smoking chimneys 
of supper. 

But the goer afoot must not be conceived as 
primarily an engine of muscle. He is the best walker 
who keeps most widely awake in his five senses. Some 
men might as well walk through a railway tunnel. 
They are so concerned with the getting there that a 
black night hangs over them. They plunge forward 
with their heads down as though they came of an 
antique race of road builders. Should there be mile- 
posts they are busied with them only, and they will 
draw dials from their pokes to time themselves. I 
fell into this iniquity on a walk in Wales from Bala 
to Dolgelley. Although I set out leisurely enough, 
with an eye for the lake and hills, before many hours 

13 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



had elapsed I had acquired the milepost habit and 
walked as if for a wager. I covered the last twenty 
miles in less than five hours, and when the brown 
stone village came in sight and I had thumped down 
the last hill and over the peaked bridge, I was a 
dilapidated and foot-sore vagrant and nothing more. 
To this day Wales for me is the land where one's feet 
have the ugly habit of foregathering in the end of 
the shoes. 

Worse still than the athletic walker is he who takes 
Dame Care out for a stroll. He forever runs his 
machinery, plans his business ventures and introduces 
his warehouse to the countryside. 

Nor must walking be conceived as merely a means 
of resting. One should set out refreshed and for this 
reason morning is the best time. Yours must be an 
exultant mood. "Full many a glorious morning 
have I seen flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign 
eye." Your brain is off at a speed that was impossible 
in your lack-luster days. You have a flow of thoughts 
instead of the miserable trickle that ordinarily serves 
your business purposes and keeps you from under 
the trolley cars. 

But all truantry is not in the open air. I know a 
man who while it is yet winter will get out his rods 
and fit them together as he sits before the fire. Then 
he will swing his arm forward from the elbow. The 

14 ^ 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



table has become his covert and the rug beyond is 
his pool. And sometimes even when the rod is not 
in his hand he will make the motion forward from 
the elbow and will drop his thumb. It will show that 
he has jumped the seasons and that he stands to his 
knees in an August stream. 

It was but yesterday on my return from work that 
I witnessed a sight that moved me pleasantly to 
thoughts of truantry. Now, in all points a grocer's 
wagon is staid and respectable. Indeed, in its adher- 
ence to the business of the hour we might use it as 
a pattern. For six days in the week it concerns itself 
solely with its errands of mercy — such "whoas" and 
running up the kitchen steps with baskets of pota- 
toes — such poundings on the door — such golden 
wealth of melons as it dispenses. Though there 
may be a kind of gayety in this, yet I'll hazard 
that in the whole range of quadricycle life no 
vehicle is more free from any taint of riotous conduct. 
Mark how it keeps its Sabbath in the shed! Yet 
here was this sturdy Puritan tied by a rope to a 
motor-car and fairly bounding down the street. It 
was a worse breach than when Noah was drunk 
within his tent. Was it an instance of falling into 
bad company? It was Nym, you remember, who set 
Master Slender on to drinking. "And I be drunk 
again," quoth he, "I'll be drunk with those that have 

15 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



the fear of God, and not with drunken knaves." Or 
rather did not every separate squeak of the grocer's 
wagon cry out a truant disposition? After years of 
repression here was its chance at last. And with what 
a joyous rollic, with what a lively clatter, with what a 
hilarious reeling, as though in gay defiance of the 
law of gravity, was it using its liberty! Had it been 
a hearse in a runaway, the comedy would not have 
been better. If I had been younger I would have 
pelted after and climbed in over the tailboard to 
share the reckless pitch of its enfranchisement. 

Then there is a truantry that I mention with 
hesitation, for it comes close to the heart of my desire, 
and in such matter particularly I would not wish to 
appear a fool to my fellows. The child has this 
truantry when he plays at Indian, for he fashions the 
universe to his desires. But some men too can lift 
themselves, though theirs is an intellectual boot- 
strap, into a life that moves above these denser airs. 
Theirs is an intensity that goes deeper than day- 
dreaming, although it admits distant kinship. 
Through what twilight and shadows do such men 
climb until night and star-dust are about them! 
Theirs is the dizzy exaltation of him who mounts 
above the world. Alas, in me is no such unfathom- 
able mystery. I but trick myself. Yet I have my 
moments. These stones that I carry on the mountain, 

16 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



what of them? On what windy ridge do I build my 
castle? It is shrill and bleak, they say, on the top- 
most peaks of the Delectable Mountains, so lower 
down I have reared its walls. There is no storm in 
these upland valleys and the sun sits pleasantly on 
their southern slopes. But even if there be unfolded 
no broad prospect from the devil to the sunrise, there 
are pleasant cottages in sight and the smoke of many 
suppers curling up. 

If you happened to have been a freshman at Yale 
some eighteen years ago and were at all addicted to 
canoeing on Lake Whitney, and if, moreover, on 
coming off the lake there burned in you a thirst for 
ginger-beer — as is common in the gullet of a fresh- 
man — doubtless you have gone from the boathouse 
to a certain little white building across the road to 
gratify your hot desires. When you opened the door, 
your contemptible person — I speak with the vocabu- 
lary of a sophomore — is proclaimed to all within by 
the jangling of a bell. After due interval wherein 
you busy yourself in an inspection of the cakes and 
buns that beam upon you from a show-case — your 
nose meanwhile being pressed close against the glass 
for any slight blemish that might deflect your decision 
(for a currant in the dough often raises an unsavory 
suspicion and you'll squint to make the matter 
sure) — there will appear through a back door a little 

IT ■■ ^ — 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



old man to minister unto you. You will give no great 
time to the naming of your drink — ^for the fires are 
hot in you — but will take your bottle to a table. The 
braver spirits among you will scorn glasses as 
effeminate and will gulp the liquor straight from the 
bottle with what wickedest bravado you can muster. 

Now it is likely that you have done this with a 
swagger and have called your servitor "old top" or 
other playful name. Mark your mistake ! You were 
in the presence, if you but knew it, of a real author, 
not a tyro fumbling for self-expression, but a man 
with thirty serials to his credit. Shall I name the 
periodical? It was the Golden Hours j I think. 
Ginger-beer and jangling bells were but a fringe 
upon his darker purpose. His desk was somewhere 
in the back of the house, and there he would rise to 
all the fury of a South- Sea wreck — for his genius lay 
in the broader effects. Even while we simpletons 
jested feebly and practiced drinking with the open 
throat — which we esteemed would be of service when 
we had progressed to the heavier art of drinking real 
beer — even as we munched upon his ginger cakes, he 
had left us and was exterminating an army corps in 
the back room. He was a little man, pale and 
stooped, but with a genius for truantry — a pilgrim 
of the Bagdad road. 

But we move on too high a plane. Most of us are 

18 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



admitted into truantry by the accidents, merely, of 
our senses. By way of instance, the sniff of a rotten 
apple will set a man off as on seven-league boots to 
the valleys of his childhood. The dry rustling of 
November leaves re-lights the fires of youth. It 
was only this afternoon that so slight a circumstance 
as a ray of light flashing in my eye provided me an 
agreeable and unexpected truantry. It sent me 
climbing the mountains of the North and in no less 
company than that of Brunhilda and a troop of 
Valkyrs. 

It is likely enough that none of you have heard of 
Long Street. As far as I am aware it is not known 
to general fame. It is typically a back street of the 
business of a city, that is, the ventages of its buildings 
are darkened most often by packing cases and bales. 
Behind these ventages are metal shoots. To one 
uninitiated in the ways of commerce it would appear 
that these openings were patterned for the multiform 
enactment of an Amy Robsart tragedy, with such 
devilish deceit are the shoots laid up against the open- 
ings. First the teamster teeters and cajoles the box 
to the edge of the dray, then, with a sudden push, 
he throws it off down the shoot, from which it dis- 
appears with a booming sound. As I recall it was 
by some such treachery that Amy Robsart met her 
death. Be that as it may, all day long great drays 

■ 19 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



go by with Earls of Leicester on their lofty seats, 
prevailing on their horses with stout, Elizabethan 
language. If there comes a tangle in the traffic it 
is then especially that you will hear a largeness of 
speech as of spacious and heroic days. 

During the meaner hours of daylight it is my 
privilege to occupy a desk and chair at a window that 
overlooks this street. Of the details of my activity 
I shall make no mention, such level being far below 
the flight of these enfranchised hours of night wherein 
I write. But in the pauses of this activity I see below 
me wagon loads of nails go by and wagon loads of 
harmners hard after, to get a crack at them. Then 
there will be a truck of saws, as though the planking 
of the world yearned toward amputation. Or maybe, 
at a guess, ten thousand rat-traps will move on down 
the street. It's sure they take us for Hamelin Town, 
and are eager to lay their ambushment. There is 
something rather stirring in such prodigious marshal- 
ing, but I hear you ask what this has to do with 
truantry. 

It was near quitting time yesterday that a dray 
was discharging cases down a shoot. These cases 
were secured with metal reinforcement, and this metal 
being rubbed bright happened to catch a ray of the 
sun at such an angle that it was reflected in my eye. 
This flash, which was like lightning in its intensity, 

20 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



together with the roar of the falling case, transported 
me — it's monstrous what jumps we take when the fit 
is on us — to the slopes of dim mountains in the night, 
to the heights above Valhalla with the flash of Valkyrs 
descending. And the booming of the case upon the 
slide — God pity me — was the music. It was thus that 
I was sent aloft upon the mountains of the North, 
into the glare of lightning, with the cry of Valkyrs 
above the storm. . . . 

But presently there was a voice from the street. 
"It's the last case to-night, Sam, you lunk-head. It's 
quitting time." 

The light fades on Long Street. The drays have 
gone home. The Earls of Leicester drowse in their 
own kitchens, or spread whole slices of bread on their 
broad, aristocratic palms. Somewhere in the dimmest 
recesses of those cluttered buildings ten thousand rat- 
traps await expectant the oncoming of the rats. And 
in your own basement — the shadows having prospered 
in the twilight — it is sure (by the beard of the 
prophet, it is sure) that the ash-pit door is again 
ajar and that a pair of eyes gleam upon you from the 
darkness. If, on the instant, you will crouch behind 
the laundry tubs and will hold your breath — as 
though a doctor's thermometer were in your mouth, 
you with a cold in the head — it's likely that you will 
see a Persian climb from the pit, shake the ashes off 

21 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



him, and make for the vantage of the woodpile, 
where — the window being barred — he will sigh his 
soul for the freedom of the night. 




22 



THE \K/OK5T EDITION 
OF 5HAKE5PEAKE 



Vv"t"a.' 




THE \></OKST EDITION 
OF SHAKE5PEAKE 



Reader, if by fortunate chance you have a son of 
tender years — the age is best from the sixth to the 
eleventh summer — or in lieu of a son, a nephew, only 
a few years in pants — mere shoots of nether garments 
not yet descending to the knees — doubtless, if such 
fortunate chance be yours, you went on one or more 
occasions last summer to a circus. 

If the true holiday spirit be in you — and you be of 
other sort, I'll not chronicle you — you will have come 
early to the scene for a just examination of what 
mysteries and excitements are set forth in the side- 
shows. Now if you be a man of humane reasoning, 
you will stand lightly on your legs, alert to be pulled 
this way or that as the nepotic wish shall direct, 

25 ■ 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



whether it be to the fat woman's booth or to the plat- 
form where the thin man sits with legs entwined 
behind his neck, in delightful promise of what joy- 
awaits you when you have dropped your nickel in 
the box and gone inside. To draw your steps, it is 
the showman's privilege to make what blare he please 
upon the sidewalk; to puff his cheeks with robustious 
announcement. 

If by further fortunate chance, you are addicted, 
let us say, in the quieter hours of winter, to writing 
of any kind — and for your joy, I pray that this be so, 
whether this writing be in massive volumes, or 
obscure and unpublished beyond its demerit — if such 
has been your addiction, you have found, doubtless, 
that your case lies much like the fat woman's; that 
it is the show you give before the door that must 
determine what numbers go within — that, to be plain 
with you, much thought must be given to the taking 
of your title. It must be a most alluring trumpeting, 
above the din of rival shows. 

So I have named this article with thought of how 
I might stir your learned curiosity. I have set 
scholars' words upon my platform, thereby to make 
you think how prodigiously I have stuffed the matter 
in. And all this while, my article has to do only with 
a certain set of Shakespeare in nine calfskin volumes, 
edited by a man named John Bell, now long since 

26 



THE WORST EDITION OF SHAKESPEARE 

dead, which set happens to have stood for several 
years upon my shelves; also, how it was disclosed to 
me that he was the worst of all editors, together with 
the reasons thereto and his final acquittal from the 
charge. 

John Bell has stood, for the most part, in unfin- 
gered tranquillity, for I read from a handier, single 
volume. Only at cleaning times has he been touched, 
and then but in the common misery with all my books. 
Against this cleaning, which I take to be only a quirk 
of the female brain, I have often urged that the great, 
round earth itself has been subjected to only one 
flood, and that even that was a failure, for, despite 
Noah's shrewdness at the gangway, villains still per- 
sist on it. How then shall my books profitably 
endure a deluge both autumn and spring? 

Thereafter, when the tempest has spent itself and 
the waters have returned from off my shelves, 111 
venture in the room. There will be something 
different in the sniff of the place, and it will be 
marvelously picked up. Yet I can mend these faults. 
But it does fret me how books will be standing on 
their heads. Were certain volumes only singled out 
to stand upon their heads, Shaw for one, and others 
of our moderns, I would suspect the housemaid of 
expressing in this fashion a sly and just criticism of 
their inverted beliefs. I accused her on one occasion 

27 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



of this subtlety, but was met by such a vacant stare 
that I acquitted her at once. However, as she leaves 
my solidest authors also on their heads, men beyond 
the peradventure of such antics, I must consider it 
but a part of her carelessness, for which I have warned 
her twice. Were it not for her cunning with griddle- 
cakes, to which I am much affected, I would have 
dismissed her before this. 

And now this Bell, which has ridden out so many 
of my floods, is proclaimed to me a villain. We had 
got beyond the April freshets and there was in conse- 
quence a soapy smell about. It is clear in my mind 
that a street organ had started up a gay tune and that 
there were sounds of gathering feet. I was reading 
at the time, in the green rocker by the lamp, a life of 
John Murray, by one whose name I have forgotten, 
when my eyes came on the sentence that has shaken 
me. Bell, it said. Bell of my own bookshelf, of all 
the editors of Shakespeare was the worst. 

In my agitation I removed my glasses, breathed 
upon the lenses, and polished them. Here was one 
of my familiars accused of something that was doubt- 
less heinous, although in what particulars I was at 
a loss to know. It came on me suddenly. It was like 
a whispered scandal, sinister in its lack of detail. All 
that I had known of Bell was that its publication had 
dated from the eighteenth century. Yet its very age 

2g 



THE WORST EDITION OF SHAKESPEARE 




had seemed a patent of respectability. If a thing 
does not rot and smell in a hundred and forty years, 
it would seem to be safe from corruption : it were true 



29 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



peacock. But here at last from Bell was an unsavory 
whiff. My flood had abated only a fortnight since, 
and here was a stowaway escaped. Bell was pro- 
claimed a villain. Again had a flood proved itself a 
failure. 

Now, I feel no shame in having an outsider like 
Murray display to me these hidden evils; for I owe 
no inquisitorial duty to my books. There are people 
who will not admit a volume to their shelves until they 
have thrown it open and laid its contents bare. This 
is the unmannerly conduct of the customs wharf. 
Indeed, it is such scrutiny, doubtless, that induces 
some authors to pack their ideas obscurely, thereby 
to smuggle them. However, there being now a 
scandal on my shelves, I must spy into it. 

John Murray, wherein I had read the charge, had 
been such a friendly, tea-and-gossip book, not the 
kind to hiss a scandal at you. It was bound in blue 
cloth and was a heavy book, so that I held it on a 
cushion. (And this device I recommend to others.) 
It was the kind of book that stays open at your place, 
if you leave it for a moment to poke the fire. Some 
books will flop a hundred pages, to make you thumb 
them back and forth, though whether this be the 
binder's fault or a deviltry set therein by their authors 
I am at a loss to say. But Shaw would be of this 
kind, flopping and spry to mix you up. And in 

30 



THE WORST EDITION OF SHAKESPEARE 



general, Shaw's humor is like that of a shell-man 
at a country fair — a thimble-rigger. No matter 
where you guess that he has placed the bean, you will 
be always wrong. Even though you swear that you 
have seen him slip it under, it's but his cunning to 
lead you oflp. But Murray was not that kind. It 
would stand at its post, unhitched, like a family horse. 

Here was quandary. I looked at Bell, but God 
forgive me, it was not with the old trustfulness. He 
was on the top shelf but one, just in line with the 
eyes, with gilt front winking in the firelight. I had 
set him thus conspicuous with intention, because of 
his calfskin binding, quite old and worn. A decayed 
Gibbon, I had thought, proclaims a grandfather. A 
set of British Essayists, if disordered, takes you back 
of the black walnut. To what length, then, of cul- 
tured ancestry must not this Bell give evidence? (I 
had bought Bell, secondhand, on Farringdon Road, 
London, from a cart, cheap, because a volume was 
missing. ) 

And now it seemed he was in some sort a villain. 
Although shocked, I felt a secret joy. For some- 
what too broadly had Bell smirked his sanctity on 
me. When piety has been flaunting over you, you 
will steal a slim occasion to proclaim a flaw. There 
is much human nature goes to the stoning of a saint. 
In my ignorance I had set the rogue in the company 

31 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



of the decorous Lorna Doone and the gentle ladies 
of Mrs. Gaskell. It is not that I admire that chaste 
assembly. But it were monstrous, even so, that I 
should neighbor them with this Bell, who, as it 
appeared, was no better than a wolf in calf's clothing. 
It was Little Red Riding Hood, you will recall, who 
mistook a wolf for her grandmother. And with what 
grief do we look on her unhappy end! 

My hand was now raised to drag Bell out by the 
heels, when I reflected that what I had heard might 
be unfounded gossip, mere tattle, and that before I 
turned against an old acquaintance, it were well to 
set an inquiry afoot. First, however, I put him 
alongside Herbert Spencer. If it were Bell's desire 
to play the grandmother to him, he would find him 
tough meat. 

Bell, John — I looked him up, first in volume Aus 
to Bis of the encyclopedia, without finding him, and 
then successfully in the National Biography — Bell, 
John, was a London bookseller. He was born in 
1745, published his edition of Shakespeare in 1774, 
and after this assault, with the blood upon him, lived 
fifty years. This was reassuring. It was then but 
a bit of wild oats, no hanging matter. I now went 
at the question deeply. Yet I left him awhile with 
the indigestible Herbert. 

32 



THE WORST EDITION OF SHAKESPEARE 

It was in 1774 that Bell squirted his dirty ink. In 
The Gentleman's Magazine for that year appear 
mutterings from America, since called the Boston 
Tea Party. I set this down to bring the time more 
warmly to your mind, for a date alone is but a blurred 
signpost unless you be a scholar. And it is advisedly 
that I quote from this particular periodical, because 
its old files can best put the past back upon its legs 
and set it going. There is a kind of history-book that 
sorts the bones and ties them all about with strings, 
that sets the past up and bids it walk. Yet it will not 
wag a finger. Its knees will clap together, its chest 
fall in. Such books are like the scribblings on a tomb- 
stone; the ghost below gives not the slightest squeal 
of life. But slap it shut and read what was written 
hastily at the time on the pages of The Gentleman's 
Magazine, and it will be as though Gabriel had blown 
a practice toot among the headstones. It is then that 
you will get the gibbering of returning life. 

So it was in 1774 that Bell put out his version of 
Shakespeare. Bell was not a man of the schools. 
Caring not a cracked tinkle for learning, it was not 
to the folios, nor to any authority that he turned for 
the texts of his plays. Instead, he went to Drury 
Lane and Covent Garden and took their acting 
copies. These volumes, then, that catch my firelight 
hold the very plays that the crowds of 1774 looked 

33 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



upon. Herein is the Romeo, word for word, that 
Lydia Languish sniffled over. Herein is Shylock, 
not yet with pathos on him, but a buffoon still, to 
draw the gallery laugh. 

A few nights later, having by grace of God escaped 
a dinner out, and being of a consequence in a kindly 
mood, the scandal, too, having somewhat abated in 
my memory, I took down a brown volume and ran 
my fingers over its sides and along its yellow edges. 
Then I made myself comfortable and opened it up. 

There is nothing to-day more degenerate than our 
title-pages. It is in a mean spirit that we pinch and 
starve them. I commend the older kind wherein, 
generously ensampled, is the promise of the rich diet 
that shall follow. At the circus, I have said, I'll go 
within that booth that has most allurement on its 
canvas front, and where the hawker has the biggest 
voice. If a fellow will but swallow a snake upon the 
platform at the door, my money is already in my 
palm. Thus of a book I demand an earnest on the 
title-page. 

Bell's title-page is of the right kind. In the pro- 
fusion and variety of its letters it is like a printer's 
sample book, with tall letters and short letters, 
dogmatic letters for heaping facts on you and script 
letters reclining on their elbows, convalescent in the 
text. There are slim letters and again the very 

34 



THE WORST EDITION OF SHAKESPEARE 

progeny of Falstaff. And what flourishes on the 
page! It is like a pond after the antics of a skater. 

There follows the subscribers' list. It is a Mr. 
Tickle's set that has come to me, for his name is on 
the fly-leaf. But for me and this set of Bell, Mr. 
Tickle would seem to have sunk into obscurity. I 
proclaim him here, and if there be anywhere at 
this day younger Tickles, even down to the merest 
titillation, may they see these lines and thus take a 
greeting from the past. 

Then follows an essay on oratory. It made me 
grin from end to end. Yet, as on the repeating of a 
comic story, it is hard to get the sting and rollic on 
the tongue. And much quotation on a page makes 
it like a foundling hospital — sentences unparented, 
ideas abandoned of their proper text. "Where grief 
is to be expressed," says Bell, "the right hand laid 
slowly on the left breast, the head and chest bending 
forward, is a just expression of it. . . . Ardent 
affection is gained by closing both hands warmly, at 
half arm's length, the fingers intermingling, and 
bringing them to the breast with spirit. . . . Folding 
arms, with a drooping of the head, describe contem- 
plation." I have put it to you and you can judge it. 

Let us consider Bell's marginalia of the plays! 
Every age has importuned itself with words. Reason 
was such a word, and fraternity, and liberty, Effi- 

35 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



ciency, maj^be, is the latest, though it is sure that 
when you want anything done properly, you have 
to fight for it. It is below the dignity of my page 
to put a plumber on it, yet I have endured occasions ! 
This word efficiency, then, comes from our needs and 
not from our accomplishment. It is at best a march- 
ing song, not a shout of victory. It is when the house 
is dirty that the cry goes up for brooms. 

So Bell in the notes upon the margins of his pages 
echoes a world that is talking about delicacy, about 
sentiment, about equality, (For a breeze blows up 
from France.) It was these words that the eight- 
eenth century most babbled when it grew old. It 
had horror for what was low and vulgar. It wore 
laces on its doublet front, and though it seldom 
washed, it perfumed itself. And all this is in Bell, 
for his notes are a running comment of a shallow, 
puritanistic prig, who had sharp eyes and a gossip's 
tongue. This was the time, too, when such words as 
blanket were not spoken by young ladies if men were 
about; for it is a bedroom word and therefore 
immoral. Bell objected from the bottom of his silly 
soul that Lady Macbeth should soil her mouth with 
it. "Blanket of the dark," he says, "is an expression 
greatly below our author. Curtain is evidently 
better." "Was the hope drunk wherein you dressed 
yourself?" Whereat Bell again complains that Lady 

36 



THE WORST EDITION OF SHAKESPEARE 

Macbeth is "unnecessarily indelicate." "Though 
this tragedy," says Bell, "must be allowed a very 
noble composition, it is highly reprehensible for 
exhibiting the chimeras of witchcraft, and still more 
so for advancing in several places the principles of 
fatalism. We would not wish to see young, unsettled 
minds to peruse this piece without proper companions 
to prevent absurd prejudices." 

It must appear from this, that, although one gains 
no knowledge of Shakespeare, one does gain a con- 
siderable knowledge of Bell and of his time. And 
this is just as well. For Bell's light on Shakespeare 
would be but a sulphur match the more at carnival 
time. Indeed, Shakespeare criticism has been such 
a pageantry of spluttering candle-ends and sniffing 
wicks that it is well that one or two tallow dips leave 
the rabble and illuminate the adjacent alleys. It is 
down such an alley that Bell's smoking light goes 
wandering off. 

As I read Bell this night, it is as though I listen 
at the boxes and in the pit, in that tinkling time of 
'seventy-four. The patched Lsetitia sits surrounded 
by her beaux. It was this afternoon she had the 
vapors. Next to her, as dragon over beauty, is a fat 
dame with "grenadier head-dress." "The Rivals" 

: 37 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



has yet to be written. London still hears "The 
Beggar's Opera." Lady Macbeth is played in hoop- 
skirts. The Bastille is a tolerably tight building. 
Robert Burns is strewn with his first crumbs. It is 
the age of omber, of sonnets to Chloe's false ringlets, 
of odes to red heels and epics to lap dogs, of tinseled 
struttings in gilded drawing-rooms. It was town- 
and-alley, this age; and though the fields lay daily in 
their new creation with sun and shadow on them, 
together with the minstrelsy of the winds across them 
and the still pipings of leaf and water, London, the 
while, kept herself in her smudgy convent, her ear 
tuned only to the jolting music of her streets, the 
rough syncope of wheel and voice. Since then what 
countless winds have blown across the world, and 
cloud-wrack! And this older century is now but a 
clamor of the memory. What mystery it is! What 
were the happenings in that pin-prick of universe 
called London? Of all the millions of ant hills this 
side Orion, what about this one? London was so 
certain it was the center of circumambient space. 
Tintinnabulate, little Bell! 

So you see that the head and front of BelFs villainy 
was that he was a little man with an abnormal 
capacity for gossip. If gossip, then, be a gallows 

38 



THE WORST EDITION OF SHAKESPEARE 

matter, let Bell unbutton him for the end. On the 
contrary, if gossip be but a trifle, here were a case for 
clement judgment. 

In the first place, there is no vice of necessity in 
gossip. This must be clearly understood. It is 
proximity in time and place that makes it intolerable. 
A gossip next door may be a nuisance. A gossip in 
history may be delightful. No doubt if I had lived 
in Auchinleck in the days when Bos well lived at home, 
I would have thought him a nasty little "skike." 
But let him get to London and far off in the revolving 
years, and I admit him virtuous. 

A gossip seldom dies. The oldest person in every 
community is a gossip and there are others still 
blooming and tender, who we know will live to be 
leathery and hard. That the life-insurance actuaries 
do not recognize this truth is a shame to their percep- 
tion. Ancestral lesions should bulk for them no 
bigger than any slightest taint of keyhole lassitude. 
For it is by thinking of ourselves that we die. It 
leads to rheums and indigestions and off we go. And 
even an ignoble altruism would save us. I know one 
old lady who has been preserved to us these thirty 
years by no other nostrum than a knot-hole appear- 
ing in her garden fence. 

39 



qi««(imn«p< 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



It is a matter of doubt whether at the fashionable 
cures it is the water that has chief potency; or 
whether, so many being met together each morning 




at the pump, it is not the exchange of these bits of 
news that leads to convalescence. It is marvelous 
how a dull eye lights up if the bit be spicy. There 
was a famous cure, I'm told, though I answer not for 



40 



THE WORST EDITION OF SHAKESPEARE 

the truth of this, closed up for no other reason than 
that a deeper scandal being hissed about (a lady's 
maid affair), all the inmates became distracted from 
their own complaints, and so, being made new, 
departed. To this day the building stands with 
broken doors and windows as testament to the blight 
such a sudden miracle put on the springs. 

This shows, therefore, that gossipry must be judged 
by its effects. If it allay the stone or give a pleasant 
evening it should have reward instead of punishment. 
And here had Bell diverted me agreeably for an hour. 
It is true he had given me no "chill and arid knowl- 
edge" of Shakespeare, but I had had ample substitute 
and the clock had struck ten before its time. It were 
justice, then, that I cast back the lie on Murray and 
give Bell full acquittal. 

No sooner was this decision made than I lifted him 
tenderly from the shelf where I had sequestered him. 
Volume seven was on its head, but I set it upright. 
Then I stroked its sides and blew upon its top, as is 
my custom. At the last I put him on his former 
shelf in the company of the chaste Lorna Doone and 
the gentle ladies of Mrs. Gaskell. 

He sits there now, this night, on the top shelf but 
one, just in line with the eyes, with gilt front winking 

41 ^ 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



in the firelight. A decayed Gibbon, I had thought, 
proclaims a grandfather. To what length, then, of 
cultured ancestry must not this Bell give evidence? 




42 



THE DECLINE OF 
NIGHT-CAP5 ^:^ 



■^'1 




THE DECLINE OF 
NIGHT-CAP5 ^^ 

It sounds like the tinkle of triviality to descend 
from the stern business of this present time to write 
of night-caps: And yet while the discordant battles 
are puffing their cheeks upon the rumbling bass pipes, 
it is relief if there be intermingled a small, shrill 
treble — any slightest squeak outside the general woe. 

There was a time when the chief issue of fowl 
was feather-beds. Some few tallest and straightest 
feathers, maybe, were used on women's hats, and a 
few of better nib than common were set aside for 
poets' use — goose feathers in particular being fash- 
ioned properly for the softer flutings, whether of 

45 ■ 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



Love or Spring — but in the main the manifest 
destiny of a feather was a feather-bed. 

In those days it was not enough that you plunged 
to the chin in this hot swarm of feathers, for discre- 
tion, in an attempt to ward off from you all snuffling |i 
rheums, coughings, hackings and other fleshly ills, 
required you before kicking off the final slippers to 
shut the windows against what were believed to be 
the dank humors of the night. Nor was this enough. 
You slept, of course, in a four-post bed; and the 
curtains had to be pulled together beyond the per- 
adventure of a cranny. Then as a last prophylaxis 
you put on a night-cap. Mr. Pickwick's was tied 
under the chin like a sunbonnet and the cords dangled 
against his chest, but this was a matter of taste. It 
was behind such triple rampart that you slept, and 
were adjudged safe from the foul contagion of the 
dark. Consequently your bed was not exactly like 
a little boat. Rather it was like a Pullman sleeper, 
which, as you will remember, was invented early in 
the nineteenth century and stands as a monument 
to its wisdom. 

I have marveled at the ease with which Othello 
strangled Desdemona. Further thought gives it 
explanation. The poor girl was half suffocated 
before he laid hands on her. I find also a solution 
of Macbeth's enigmatic speech, "Wicked dreams 

^ 46 



THE DECLINE OF NIGHT-CAPS 



abuse the curtain'd sleep." Any dream that could 
get at you through the eireumvallation of glass, 
brocade, cotton and feathers could be no better than 
a quadruplicated house-breaker, compounded out of 
desperate villainies. 

Reader, have you ever purchased a pair of pajamas 
in London? This is homely stuff I write, yet there's 
pathos in it. That jaunty air betokens the beginning 
of your search before question and reiteration have 
dulled your spirits. Later, there will be less sparkle 
in your eye. What! Do not the English wear pa- 
jamas? Does not the sex that is bifurcated by day 
keep by night to its manly bifurcation? Is not each 
separate leg swathed in complete divorcement from 
its fellow? Or, womanish, do they rest in the common 
dormitory of a shirt de niiit? The Englishman does 
wear pajamas, but the word with him takes on an 
Icelandic meaning. They are built to the prescrip- 
tion of an Esquimo. They are woolly, fuzzy and 
the width of a finger thick. If I were a night- 
watchman, "doom'd for a certain term to walk the 
night," I should insist on English pajamas to keep 
me awake. If Saint Sebastian, who, I take it, wore 
sackcloth for the glory of his soul, could have lighted 
on the pair of pajamas that I bought on Oxford 
Circus, his halo would have burned the brighter. 

Just how the feathery and billowy nights of our 

47 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



great-grandparents were changed into the present is 
too deep for explanation. Perhaps Annie left a door 
or window open — such neglect fitting with her other 
heedlessness — and notwithstanding this means of 
entry, it was found in the morning that no sprite or 
ooph had got in to pinch the noses of the sleepers. 
At least, there was no evidence of such a visitation, 
unless the snoring that abounded all the night did 
proceed from the pinching of the nose (the nasal 
orifice being so clamped betwixt the forefinger and 
the thumb of these devilish sprites that the breath 
was denied its proper channel). Unless snoring was 
so caused, it is clear that no ooph had clambered 
through the window. 

Or perhaps some brave man — a brother to him who 
first ate an oyster — put up the window out of bravado 
to snap thereby his fingers at the forms of darkness, 
and being found whole and without blemish or mark 
of witch upon his throat and without catarrhal 
snuffling in his nose, of a consequence the harsh 
opinion against the night softened. 

Or maybe some younger woman threw up her 
window to listen to the slim tenor of moonlight 
passion with such strumming business as accom- 
panied — tinkling of cithern or mandolin — and so 
with chin in hand, she sighed her soul abroad, to the 
result that the closing was forgotten. It is like 



48 



THE DECLINE OF NIGHT-CAPS 



enough that her dreams were all the sweeter for the 
breeze that blew across her bed — loaded with the 
rhythmic memory of the words she had heard within 
the night. 

It was vanity killed the night-cap. What alder- 
manic man would risk the chance of seeing himself 
in the mirror? What judge, peruked by day, could 
so contain his learned locks? What male with waxed 
moustachios, or with limpest beard, or chin new- 
reaped would put his ears in such a compress? You 
will recall how Mr. Pickwick snatched his off when 
he found the lady in the curl papers in his room. His 
round face showed red with shame against the dusky 
bed-curtains, like the sun peering through the fog. 

As for bed-curtains, they served the intrigue of at 
least five generations of novelists from Fielding 
onward. There was not a rogue's tale of the eight- 
eenth century complete without them. The wrong 
persons were always being pinned up inside them. 
The cause of such confusion started in the tap, too 
much negus or an over- drop of pineapple rum with 
a lemon in it or a potent drink whose name I have 
forgotten that was always ordered "and make it hike, 
my dear." Then, after such evening, a turn to the 
left instead of right, a wrong counting of doors along 
the passage, the jiggling of bed-curtains, screams 
and consternation. It is one of the seven original 

■ — 49 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



plots. Except for clothes-closets, screens and bed- 
curtains, Sterne must have gone out of the novel 
business, Sheridan have lost fecundity and Dryden 
starved in a garret. But the moths got into their red 
brocade at last and a pretty meal they made. 

A sleeping porch is the symbol of the friendly 
truce between man and the material universe. The 
world itself and the void spaces of its wanderings, 
together with the elements of our celestial neighbor- 
hood, have been viewed by man with dark suspicion, 
with rather a squint-eyed prejudice. Let's take 
a single case ! Winds for a long time have borne bad 
reputations — except such anemic collateral as are 
called zephyrs — but winds, properly speaking, which 
are big and strong enough to have rough chins and 
beards coming, have been looked upon as roustabouts. 
What was mere humor in their behavior has been set 
down to mischief. If a wind in playfulness does but 
shake a casement, or if in frolic it scatters the ashes 
across the hearth, or if in liveliness it swishes you as 
you turn a corner and drives you aslant across the 
street, is it right that you set your tongue to gossip 
and judge it a son of Belial? 

There are persons also — but such sleep indoors — 
in whose ears the wind whistles only gloomy tunes. 
Or if it rise to shrill piping, it rouses only a fear of 
chimneys. Thus in both high pitch and low there is 

50 . 



THE DECLINE OF NIGHT-CAPS 



fear in the hearing of it. Into their faces will come 
a kind of God-help-the-poor-sailors-in-the-channel 
look, as in a melodrama when the paper snowstorm is 
at its worst and the wind machine is straining at its 
straps. One would think that they were afraid the 
old earth itself might be buffeted off its course and 
fall afoul of neighboring planets. 

But behold the man whose custom is to sleep upon 
a porch ! At what slightest hint — the night being yet 
young, with scarce three yawns gone round — does he 
shut his book and screen the fire! With what speed 
he bolts the door and puts out the downstairs lights, 
lest callers catch him in the business! How briskly 
does he mount the stairs with fingers already on the 
buttons! Then with what scattering of garments he 
makes him ready, as though his explosive speed had 
blown him all to pieces and lodged him about the 
room ! 

Then behold him — such general amputation not 
having proved fatal — advancing to the door muffled 
like a monk! There is a slippered flight. He dives 
beneath the covers. (I draw you a winter picture.) 
You will see no more of him now than the tip of his 
nose, rising like a little ^tna from the waves. 

But does he fear the wind as it fumbles around the 
porch and plays like a kitten with the awning cords? 
Bless you, he has become a playmate of the children 

— — 51 ■ — 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



of the night — the swaying branches, the stars, the 
swirl of leaves — all the romping children of the night. 
And if there was any fear at all within the darkness, 
it has gone to sulk behind the mountains. 




But the wind sings a sleepy song and the game's 
too short. Then the wind goes round and round the 
house looking for the leaves — for the wind is a bit of 
a nursemaid — and wherever it finds them it tucks 



52 



THE DECLINE OF NIGHT-CAPS 



them in, under fences and up against cellar windows 
where they will be safe until morning. Then it goes 
off on other business, for there are other streets in 
town and a great many leaves to be attended to. 

But the fellow with the periscopic nose above the 
covers lies on his back beneath the stars, and contem- 
plation journeys to him from the wide spaces of the 
night. 



53 



T! 



HARS AND IVKBBIT-HOLES 



,^^ 




MAP5 AND I\ABBIT-HOLE5 

In what pleasurable mystery would we live were 
it not for maps ! If I chance on the name of a town 
I have visited, I locate it on a map. I may not 
actually get down the atlas and put my finger on 
the name, but at least I picture to myself its lines and 
contour and judge its miles in inches. And thereby 
for a thing of ink and cardboard I have banished 
from the world its immensity and mystery. But if 
there were no maps — ^what then? By other devices 
I would have to locate it. I would say that it came 
at the end of some particular day's journey; that it 
lies in the twilight at the conclusion of twenty miles 
of dusty road; that it lies one hour nightward of a 
blow-out. I would make it neighbor to an appetite 
gratified and a thirst assuaged, a cool bath, a lazy 
evening with starlight and country sounds. Is not 
this better than a dot on a printed page ? 

^ 57 ^ 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 




That is the town, I would say, where we had the 
mutton chops and where we heard the bullfrogs on 
the bridge. Or that town may be circumstanced in 
cherry pie, a comical face at the next table, a friendly 
dog with hair-trigger tail, or some immortal glass of 
beer on a bench outside a road-inn. These things 
make that town as a flame in the darkness, a flame 
on a hillside to overtop my course. Many years can 



58 



MAPS AND RABBIT-HOLES 



go grinding by without obliterating the pleasant sight 
of its flare. Or maybe the town is so intermingled 
with dismal memories that no good comes of too 
particularly locating it. Then Tony Lumpkin's 
advice on finding Mr. Hardcastle's house is enough. 
"It's a damn'd long, dark, boggy, dirty, dangerous 
way." And let it go at that. 

Maps are toadies to the thoroughfares. They 
shower their attentions on the wide pavements, hold- 
ing them up to observation, marking them in red, and 
babbling and prattling obsequiously about them, 
meanwhile snubbing with disregard all the lanes and 
bypaths. They are cockney and are interested in 
showing only the highroads between cities, and in 
consequence neglect all tributary loops and windings. 
In a word, they are against the jog-trot countryside 
and conspire with the signposts against all loitering 
and irregularity. 

As for me, I do not like a straight thoroughfare. 
To travel such a road is like passing a holiday with 
a man who is going about his business. Idle as you 
are, vacant of purpose, alert for distraction, he must 
keep his eyes straight ahead and he must attend to 
the business in hand. I like a road that is at heart 
a vagabond, which loiters in the shade and turns its 
head on occasion to look around the corner of a hill, 
which will seek out obscure villages even though it 

^ 59 ^ ^ ^ 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



requires a zigzag course up a hillside, which follows 
a river for the very love of its company and humors 
its windings, which trots alongside and listens to its 
ripple and then crosses, sans bridge, like a schoolboy, 
with its toes in the water. I love a road which goes 
with the easy, rolling gait of a sailor ashore. It has 
no thought of time and it accepts all the vagaries of 
your laziness. I love a road which weaves itself into 
eddies of eager traffic before the door of an inn, and 
stops a minute at the drinking trough because it has 
heard the thirst in your horse's whinny; and after- 
wards it bends its head on the hillside for a last look 
at the kindly spot. Ah, but the vagabond cannot 
remain long on the hills. Its best are its lower levels. 
So down it dips. The descent is easy for roads and 
cart wheels and vagabonds and much else; until in 
the evening it hears again the murmur of waters, and 
its journey has ended. 

There is of course some fun in a map that is all 
wrong. Those, for example, of the early navigators 
are worth anybody's time. There is possibility in 
one that shows Japan where Long Island ought to 
be. That map is human. It makes a correct and 
proper map no better than a molly-coddle. There 
can be fine excitement in learning on the best of four- 
teenth century authority that there is no America and 
that India lies outside the Pillars of Hercules. The 

60 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



uncharted seas, the incognova terra where lions are 
{uhi leones erunt, as the maps say) , these must always 
stir us. In my copy of Gulliver are maps of his 
discoveries. Lilliput lies off the coast of Sumatra 
and must now be within sight of the passengers bound 
from London to Melbourne if only they had eyes to 
see it. Brobdingnag, would you believe it, is a hump 
on the west coast of America and cannot be far from 
San Francisco. That gives one a start. Swift, 
writing in 1725 with a world to choose from, selects 
the Calif ornian coast as the most remote and unknown 
for the scene of his fantastical adventure. It thrusts 
1725 into a gray antiquity. And yet there are many 
buildings in England still standing that antedate 
1725 by many years, some by centuries. Queen 
Elizabeth had been dead more than a hundred years. 
Canterbury was almost as old and probably in worse 
repair than it is now, when Frisco was still Brob- 
dingnag. Can it be that the giant red trees and the 
tall bragging of the coast date from its heroic past ? 

Story-writers have nearly always been the foes of 
maps, finding in them a kind of cramping of their 
mental legs. And in consequence they have struck 
upon certain devices for getting off the map and away 
from its precise and restricting bigotry. Davy fell 
asleep. It was Davy, you remember, who grew 
drowsy one winter afternoon before the fire and sailed 

62 



MAPS AND RABBIT-HOLES 



away with the goblin in his grandfather's clock. 
Robinson Crusoe was driven off his bearings by stress 
of weather at sea. This is a popular device for elud- 
ing the known world. Whenever in your novel you 
come on a sentence like this — On the third night it 
came on to blow and that night and the three succeed- 
ing days and nights we ran close-reefed before the 
tempest — whenever you come on a sentence like that, 
you may know that the author feels pinched and 
cramped by civilization, and is going to regale you 
with some adventures of his uncharted imagination 
which are likely to be worth your attention. 

Then there was Sentimental Tommy! Do you 
remember how he came to find the Enchanted Street? 
It happened that there was a parade, "an endless row 
of policemen walking in single file, all with the right 
leg in the air at the same time, then the left leg. 
Seeing at once that they were after him. Tommy ran, 
ran, ran until in turning a corner he found himself 
wedged between two legs. He was of just sufficient 
size to fill the aperture, but after a momentary lock 
he squeezed through, and they proved to be the gate 
into an enchanted land." In that lies the whole 
philosophy of going without a map. There is magic 
in the world then. There are surprises. You do not 
know what is ahead. And you cannot tell what is 
about to happen. You move in a proper twilight of 

63 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



events. After that Tommy went looking for police- 
men's legs. Doubtless there were some details of the 
wizardry that he overlooked, as never again could he 
come out on the Enchanted Street in quite the same 
fashion. Alice had a different method. She fell 
down a rabbit-hole and thereby freed herself from 
some very irksome lessons and besides met several 
interesting people, including a Duchess. Alice may 
be considered the very John Cabot of the rabbit-hole. 
Before her time it was known only to rabbits, wood- 
chucks, and dogs on holidays, whose noses are muddy 
with poking. But since her time all this is changed. 
Now it is known as the portal of adventure. 
It is the escape from the plane of life into its third 
dimension. 

Children have the true understanding of maps. 
They never yield slavishly to them. If they want a 
pirates' den they put it where it is handiest, behind 
the couch in the sitting-room, just beyond the glim- 
mer of firelight. If they want an Indian village, 
where is there a better place than in the black space 
under the stairs, where it can be reached without 
great fatigue after supper? Farthest Thule may be 
behind the asparagus bed. The North Pole itself 
may be decorated by Annie on Monday afternoon 
with the week's wash. From whatever house you hear 
a child's laugh, if it be a real child and therefore a 

64 ^ 



MAPS AND RABBIT-HOLES 



great poet, you may know that from the garret 
window, even as you pass, Sinbad, adrift on the 
Indian Ocean, may be looking for a sail, and that 
the forty thieves huddle, daggers drawn, in the coal 
hole. Then it is a fine thing for a child to run away 
to sea — well, really not to sea, but down the street, 
past gates and gates and gates, until it comes to the 
edge of the known and sees a collie or some such 
terrible thing. I myself have fine recollection of 
running away from a farmhouse. Maybe I did not 
get more than a hundred paces, but I looked on some 
broad heavens, saw a new mystery in the night's 
shadows, and just before I became afraid I had a 
taste of a new life. 

To me it is strange that so few people go down 
rabbit-holes. We cannot be expected to find the same 
delight in squeezing our fat selves behind the couch 
of evenings, nor can we hope to find that the Chinese 
Mountains actually lie beyond our garden fence. 
We cannot exactly run away either; after one is 
twenty, that takes on an ugly and vagrant look, 
commendable as it may be on the early marches. 
Prince Hal is always a more amiable spectacle than 
John Falstaff, much as we love the knight. But there 
are men, however few, who although they are beyond 
forty, retain in themselves a fine zest for adventure. 
A man who, I am proud to say, is a friend of mine 

65 _ ^ 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



and who is a devil for work by which he is making 
himself known in the world, goes of evenings 
into the most delightful truantry with his music. 
And it isn't only music, it is flowers and pictures and 
books. Of course he has an unusual brain and few 
men can hope to equal him. He is like Disraeli in 
that respect, who, it is said, could turn in a flash from 
the problem of financing the Suez Canal to the con- 
templation of the daffodils nodding along the fence. 
But do the rest of us try? There are few men of 
business, no matter with what singleness of purpose 
they have been installing their machinery and count- 
ing their nickels, but will admit that this is but a small 
part of life. They dream of rabbit-holes, but they 
will never go down one. I had dinner recently with 
a man who by his honesty and perseverance has built 
up and maintained a large and successful business. 
An orchestra was playing, and when it finished the 
man told me that if he could write music like that we 
had heard he would devote himself to it. Well, if he 
has enough desire in him for that speech, he owes it to 
himself that he sound his own depths for the dis- 
coveries he may make. It is doubtful if this quest 
would really lead him to write music, God forbid; it 
might however induce him to develop a latent appre- 
ciation until it became in him both a refreshment and 
a stimulus. 

66 



MAPS AND RABBIT-HOLES 



There are many places uncharted that are worth 
a visit. Treasure Island is somewhere on the seas, 
the still-vex'd Bermoothes feel the wind of some 
southern ocean, the coast of Bohemia lies on the 
furthermost shore of fairyland — all of these wonder- 
ful, like white towers in the mind. But nearer home, 
as near as the pirates' den that we built as children, 
within sight of our firelight, should come the dreams 
and thoughts that set us free from sordidness, that 
teach our minds versatility and sympathy, that create 
for us hobbies and avocations of worth, that rest and 
refresh us. If we must be ocean liners all day, plod- 
ding between known and monotonous ports, at least 
we may be tramp ships at night, cargoed with strange 
stuffs and trafficking for lonely and unvisited seas. 




67 



^ 



TUNE5 FOR. SPRING 




TUNE5 FOR sSPRING 



Cuckoo, j^ig-jvLgf pu-we, to-witta-woo ! 
Spring, the sweet Spring! 

If by any chance you have seen a man in a coat 
with sagging pockets, and a cloth hat of the latest 
fashion but two — a hat which I may say is precious 
to him (old friends, old wine, old hats) — emerging 
from his house just short of noon, do not lay his 
belated appearance to any disorder in his conduct! 
Certain neighbors at their windows as he passed, 
raised their eyes in a manner, if I mistake not, of 
suspicion that a man should be so far trespassing on 
the da}^ for nine o'clock should be the penny-picker's 
latest departure for the vineyard. Thereafter the 
street belongs to the women, except for such sprouting 
and unripe manhood as brings the groceries, and the 

71 ■ 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



hardened villainy that fetches ice and with deep voice 
breaks the treble of the neighborhood. But beyond 
these there are no men in sight save the pantalooned 
exception who mows the grass, and with the whirr of 
his clicking knives sounds the prelude of the summer. 
I'll say by way of no more than a parenthetical flick 
of notice that his eastern front, conspicuous from the 
rear as he bends forward over his machine, shows a 
patched and jointed mullionry that is not unlike the 
tracery of some cathedral's rounded apse. But I go 
too far in imagery. Plain speech is best. I'll waive 
the gothic touch. 

But observe this sluggard who issues from his 
door! He knows he is suspected — that the finger is 
uplifted and the chin is wagging. And so he takes 
on a smarter stride with a pretense of briskness, to 
proclaim thereby the virtue of having risen early 
despite his belated appearance, and what mighty 
business he has despatched within the morning. 

But you will get no clue as to whether he has been 
closeted with the law, or whether it is domestic fac- 
tion — plumbers or others of their ilk (if indeed 
plumbers really have any ilk and do not, as I suspect, 
stand unbrothered like the humped Richard in the 
play) . Or maybe some swirl of fancy blew upon him 
as he was spooning up his breakfast, which he must 
set down in an essay before the matter cool. Or an 

72 



TUNES FOR SPRING 



epic may have thumped within him. Let us hope that 
his thoughts this cool spring morning have not been 
heated to such bloody purpose that he has killed a 
score of men upon his page, and that it is with the 
black gore of the ink-pot on him that he has called 
for his boots to face the world. You remember the 
fellow who kills him "some six or seven dozens of 
Scots at a breakfast, washes his hands, and says to 
his wife, *Fie upon this quiet life! I want work.' " 

Such ferocity should not sully this fair May morn- 
ing, when there are sounds only of carpet-beating, 
the tinkle of the man who is out to grind your knives 
and the recurrent melody of the connoisseur of rags 
and bottles who stands in his cart as he drives his lean 
and pointed horse. At the cry of this perfumed 
Brummel — if you be not gone in years too far — as 
often as he prepares to shout the purpose of his quest, 
you'll put a question to him, "Hey, there, what do 
you feed your wife on?" And then his answer 
will come pat to your expectation, "Pa-a-a-per 
Ra-a-a-gs, Pa-a-a-per Ra-a-a-gs!" If the persist- 
ence of youth be in you and the belief that a jest 
becomes better with repetition — like beans nine days 
cold within the pot — you will shout your question 
until he turns the corner and his answer is lost in the 
noises of the street. "Adieu! Adieu! thy plaintive 
anthem fades — " 



73 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



To this day I think of a rag-picker's wife as dining 
sparingly out of a bag — not with her head inside Kke 
a horse, but thrusting her scrawny arm elbow deep 
to stir the pottage, and sprinkling salt and pepper 
on for nicer flavor. Following such preparation 
she will fork it out like macaroni, with her head 
thrown back to present the wider orifice. If her 
husband's route lies along the richer streets she will 
have by way of tidbit for dessert a piece of chewy 
velvet, sugared and buttered to a tenderness. 

But what is this jingling racket that comes upon 
the street? Bless us, it's a hurdy-gurdy. The hurdy- 
gurdy, I need hardly tell you, belongs to the organ 
family. This family is one of the very oldest and 
claims descent, I believe, from the god Pan. How- 
ever, it accepted Christianity early and has sent many 
a son within the church to pipe divinity. But the 
hurdy-gurdy — a younger son, wild, and a bit of a 
pagan like its progenitor — took to the streets. In 
its life there it has acquired, among much rascality, 
certain charming vices that are beyond the capacity 
of its brother in the loft, however much we may 
admire the deep rumble of his Sabbath utterance. 

The world has denied that chanticleer proclaims 
the day. But as far as I know no one has had the 
insolence to deny the street-organ as the proper 
herald of the spring. Without it the seasons would 

74 



TUNES FOR SPRING 



halt. Though science lay me by the heels, I'll assert 
that the crocus, which is a pioneer on the windy bor- 
derland of March, would not show its head except on 
the sounding of the hurdy-gurdy. I'll not deny that 
flowers pop up their heads afield without such call, 
that the jack-in- the-pulpit speaks its maiden sermon 
on some other beckoning of nature. But in the city 
it is the hurdy-gurdy that gives notice of the turning 
of the seasons. On its sudden blare I've seen the 
green stalk of the daffodil jiggle. If the tune be of 
sufficient rattle and prolonged to the giving of the 
third nickel, before the end is reached there will be 
seen a touch of yellow. 

Whether this follows from the same cause as 
attracts the children to flatten their noses on the 
windows and calls them to the curb that they put 
their ears close upon the racket that no sweetest 
sound be lost, is a deep question and not to be lightly 
answered. In the sound there is promise of the days 
to come when circuses will be loosed upon the land 
and elephants will go padding by — with eyes looking 
around for peanuts. Why this biggest of all beasts, 
this creature that looms above you like a crustaceous 
dinosaur — to use long words without squinting too 
closely on their meaning — why this behemoth with 
the swishing trunk, should eat peanuts, contemptible 
peanuts, lies so deep in nature that the mind turns 

75 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



dizzy. It is small stuff to feed valor on — a penny's 
worth of food in such a mighty hulk. Whatever the 
lion eats may turn to lion, but the elephant strains 
the proverb. He might swallow you instead, breeches, 




hat and suspenders — if you be of the older school of 
dress before the belt came in — and not so much as 
cough upon the buttons. And there will be red and 
yellow wagons, boarded up seductively, as though 



76 



TUNES FOR SPRING 



they could show you, if they would, snakes and 
hyenas. May be it is best, you think — such things 
lying in the seeds of time — to lay aside a dime from 
the budget of the week, for one can never be sure 
against the carelessness of parents, and their jaded 
appetites. 

But the hurdy-gurdy is the call to sterner business 
also. I know an old lady who, at the first tinkle from 
the street, will take off her glasses with a finality as 
though she were never to use them again for the light 
pleasure of reading, but intended to fill the remainder 
of her days with deeper purpose. There is a piece 
of two-legged villainy in her employ by the name of 
William, and even before the changing of the tune, 
she will have him rolling up the rugs for the spring 
cleaning. There is a sour rhythm in the fellow and 
he will beat a pretty syncopation on them if the 
hurdy-gurdy will but stick to marching time. It is 
said that he once broke the fabric of a Kermanshah 
in his zeal at some crescendo of the Robert E, Lee, 
But he was lost upon the valse and struck languidly 
and out of time. 

But maybe, Reader, in your youth you have heated 
a penny above a lamp, and with treacherous smile 
you have come before an open window. And when 
the son of Italy has grinned and beckoned for your 
bounty — the penny being just short of a molten 

^ ^ 77 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



state — you have thrown it to him. He stoops, he 
feels. . . . You have learned by this how much more 
blessed it is to give than to receive. Or, to dig deep 
in the riot of your youth, you have leased a hurdy- 
gurdy for a dollar and with other devils of your kind 
gone forth to seek your fortune. It's in noisier 
fashion than when Goldsmith played the flute through 
France for board and bed. If you turned the handle 
slowly and fast by jerks you attained a rare tempo 
that drew attention from even the most stolid 
windows. But as music it was as naught. 

Down the street — it being now noon and the day 
Monday — Mrs. Y's washing will be out to dry. 
Observe her gaunt replica, cap-a-pie, as immodest 
as an advertisement! In her proper person she is 
prodigal if she unmask her beauty to the moon. And 
in company with this, is the woolen semblance of her 
plump husband. Neither of them is shap'd for 
sportive tricks : But look upon them when the music 
starts! Hand in hand upon the line, as is proper 
for married folk, heel and toe together, one, two, and 
a one, two, three. It is the hurdy-gurdy that calls 
to life such revelry. The polka has come to its own 
again. 

Yet despite this evidence that the hurdy-gurdy sets 
the world to dancing— like the fiddle in the Turkish 
tale where even the headsman forgot his business — 

T8 



TUNES FOR SPRING 



despite such evidence there are persons who affect to 
despise its melody. These claim such perceptivity 
of the outer ear and such fineness of the channels that 
the tune is but a clack when it gets inside. God pity 
such ! I'll not write a word of them. 

A spring day is at its best about noon. I thrust 
this in the teeth of those who prefer the dawn or the 
coming on of night. At noon there are more yellow 
wheels upon the street. The hammering on sheds is 
at its loudest as the time for lunch comes near. More 
grocers' carts are rattling on their business. There 
is a better chance that a load of green wheelbarrows 
may go by, or a wagon of red rhubarb. Then, too, 
the air is so warm that even decrepitude fumbles on 
the porch and down the steps, with a cane to poke 
the weeds. 

If you have luck, you may see a "cullud pusson" 
pushing a whitewash cart with altruistic intent 
toward all dusky surfaces except his own. Or maybe 
he has nice appreciation of what color contrasts he 
himself presents when the work is midway. If he 
wear the faded memory of a silk hat, it's the better 
picture. 

But also the schools are out and the joy of life is 
hissing up a hundred gullets. Baseball has now a 
fierceness it lacks at the end of day. There is wild 
demand that "Shorty, soak 'er home!" "Butter- 

79 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



fingers!" is a harder insult. And meanwhile a pop- 
corn wagon will be whistling a blithe if monotonous 
tune in trial if there be pennies in the crowd. Or a 
waffle may be purchased if you be a Croesus, ladled 
exclusively for you and dropped on the gridiron with 
a splutter. It is a sweet reward after you have 
knocked a three-bagger and stolen home, and is worth 
a search in all your eleven pockets for any last penny 
that may be skulking in the fuzz. 

Or perhaps there is such wealth upon your person 
that there is still a restless jingle. In such case you 
will cross the street to a shop that ministers to the 
wants of youth. In the window is displayed a box 
of marbles — glassies, commonies, and a larger browny 
adapted to the purpose of "pugging," by reason of 
the violence with which it seems to respond to the 
impact of your thumb. Then there are baseballs of 
graded excellence and seduction. And tops. Time 
is needed for the choosing of a top. First you stand 
tiptoe with nose just above the glass and make your 
trial selection. Pay no attention to the color, for 
that's the way a girl chooses ! Black is good, without 
womanish taint. Then you wiggle the peg for its 
tightness and demand whether it be screwed in like 
an honest top. And finally, before putting your 
money down, you will squint upon its roundness. 

80 — 



TUNES FOR SPRING 



Then slam the door and yell your presence to the 
street ! 

Or do you come on softer errand? In the rear of 
the shop is a parlor with a base-burner and virtuous 
mottoes on the walls — a cosy room with vases. And 
here it is they serve cream- puffs. . . . For safe 
transfer you balance the puff in your fingers and 
take an enveloping bite, emerging with a prolonged 
suck for such particles as may not have come safely 
across, and bending forward with stomach held in. 
I'll leave you in this refreshment; for if the money 
hold, you will gobble until the ringing of the bell. 

By this time, as you may imagine, the person with 
the sagging pockets whom I told you of, has arrived 
in the center of the city where already he is practicing 
such device of penny-picking as he may be master of. 




81 



RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED 

TO A MOUKNFUL AlPo 



RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED 

TO A MOUKNFUL AlPo "^L. 

To any one of several editors. 

Dear Sir: I paid a visit to your city several days 
since and humored myself with ambitious thoughts 
in the contemplation of your editorial windows. I 
was tempted to rap at your door and request an 
audience but modesty held me off. Once by appoint- 
ment I passed an hour in your office pleasantly and 
profitably and even so tardily do I acknowledge your 
courtesy and good-nature. But a beggar must choose 
his streets carefully and must not be seen too often 
in a neighborhood as the same door does not always 
offer pie. So this time your brass knocker shows no 
finger-marks of mine. 

You did not accept for publication the last paper 
I sent to you. (You spread an infinite deal of sorrow 
in your path.) On its return I re-read it and now 
confess to concurrence with your judgment. Some- 
thing had gone wrong. It was not as intended. 
Unlike Cleopatra, age had withered it. Was I not 
like a cook whose dinner has been sent back untasted ? 
The best available ingredients were put into that 
confection and if it did not issue from the oven with 
g5 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



those savory whiffs that compel appetite, my stove 
is at fault. Perhaps some good old literary housewife 
will tell me, disconsolate among my pots and pans, 
how long an idea must be boiled to be tender and how 
best to garnish a thought to an editor's taste? 
And yet, sir, your manners are excellent. It was 
Petruchio who cried: 

What's this? Mutton? — 

'Tis burnt; and so is all the meat. 

Where is the rascal cook ? 

Manners have improved. In pleasant contrast is 
your courteous note, signifying the excellence of my 
proffered pastry, your delight that you are allowed 
to sniff and your regret for lack of appetite and 
abdominal capacity. Nevertheless, the food came 
back and I poked at the broken pieces mournfully. 
It is a witch's business presiding at the caldron of 
these things and there is no magic pottage above my 
fire. 

And yet, kind sir, with your permission I shall 
continue in my ways and offer to you from time to 
time such messes as I have, hoping that some day 
your taste will deteriorate to my level or that I shall 
myself learn the witchcraft and enter your regard. 

Up to this present time only a few of my papers 
have been asked to stay. The rest have gone the 

86 



RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED 



downward tread of your stair carpet and have passed 
into the night. My desk has become a kind of 
mausoleum of such as have come home to die, and 
when I raise its lid a silence falls on me as on one who 
visits sacred places. 

There is, however, another side of this. Certain 
it is that thousands of us who write seek your recog- 
nition and regard. Certain it is that your favorable 
judgment moves us to elation, and your silence to 
our merits urges us to harder endeavors. But for all 
this, dear sir, and despite your continued neglect, we 
are a tolerably happy crew. It may be that our best 
things were never published — ^best, because we en- 
joyed them most, because they recall the happiest 
hours and the finest moods. They bring most freshly 
to our memories the influences of books and friends 
and the circumstances under which they were written. 
It is because we lacked the skill to tame our sensations 
to our uses, the patience to do well what we wished 
to do fast, that you rightly judged them unavailable. 
We do not feel rebellious and we admit that you are 
right. Only we do not care as much as we did, for 
most of us are learning to write for the love of the 
writing and without an eye on the medal. With no 
livelihood depending, with no compulsion of hours or 
subject, under the free anonymity of sure rejection, 
we have worked. It has been a fine world, these hours 

87 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



of study and reflection, and when we assert that one 
essay is our best, we are right, for it has led us to 
happiness and pleasant thoughts and to an interpre- 
tation of ourselves and the world that moves about 




us. In these best moods of ours, we live and think 
beyond our normal powers and even come to a distant 
kinship with men far greater than ourselves. Know- 
ing this, prudence only keeps us from snapping our 
fingers at you and marking each paper, as we finish 

88 



RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED 



it, "rejected," without the formality of a trip to you, 
and then happily beginning the next. We are learn- 
ing to be amateurs and although our names shall 
never be shouted from the housetops, we shall be 
almost as content. Still will there be the morning 
hours of study with sunlight across the floor, the 
winding country roads of autumn with smells of corn- 
stacks and burdened vineyards, the fire-lit hours of 
evening. Still shall we write in our gardens of a 
summer afternoon or change the winter snowstorm 
that drives against our windows into the coinage of 
our thoughts. 

We shall be independent and think and write as 
we please. And although we enclose stamps for a 
mournful recessional, please know, dear sir, that even 
as you dictate your polite note of refusal, we are hard 
at it with another paper. 




89 



THE CHILLY PKESENCE OF 
HAIV.D-HEADED PEKSONS 



THE CHILLY PKESENCE OF 
HAPoD- HEADED PEK50NS 

It is rash business scuttling your own ship. Now 
as I am in a way a practical person, which is, I take 
it, a diminutive state of hard-headedness, any detrac- 
tion against hard-headedness must appear as leveled 
against myself. Gimlet in hand, deep down amid- 
ships, it would look as if I were squatted and set on 
my own destruction. 

But by hard-headed persons I mean those beyond 
the ordinary, those so far gone that a pin-prick 
through the skull would yield not so much as a drop 
of ooze; persons whose brain convolutions did they 
appear in fright at the aperture on the insertion of 
the pin — like a head at a window when there is a fire 
on the street — would betray themselves as but a kind 
of cordage. Such hard-headedness, you will admit, 
is of a tougher substance than that which may beset 
any of us on an occasion at the price of meat, or on 
the recurrent obligations of the too-constant moon. 

I am reasonably free from colds. I do not fret 
myself into a congestion if a breath comes at me from 
an open window; or if a swirl of wind puts its cold 
fingers down my neck do I lift my collar. Yet the 
presence of a thoroughly hard-headed person pro- 

93 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



vokes a sneeze. There is a chilly vapor off him — a 
swampish miasma — that puts me in a snuffling state, 
beyond poultice and mustard footbaths. No matter 
how I huddle to the fire, my thoughts will congeal 
and my purpose cramp and stiffen. My conceit too 
will be but a shriveled bladder. 

Several years ago I knew a man of extreme hard- 
headedness. As I recall, I was afflicted at the time — 
indeed, the malady co-existed with his acquaintance — 
with a sorry catarrh of the nasal passages. I can 
remember still the clearings and snufflings that ob- 
truded in my conversation. For two winters my 
complaint was beyond the cunning of the doctors. 
Despite local applications and such pills as they 
thought fit to administer, still did the snuffling con- 
tinue. Then on a sudden my friend left town. 
Consequent to which and to the amazement of the 
profession, the springs of my disease dried up. As 
this happened at the beginning of the warm days of 
summer, I am loath to lay my cure entirely to his 
withdrawal, yet there was a nice jointry of time. My 
acquaintance thereafter dropped to an infrequent, 
statistical letter, against which I have in time proofed 
myself. But the catarrh has ceased except when some 
faint thought echoes from the past, at which again, 
as in the older days, I am forced to blow a passage 
in the channel for verbal navigation. 

^ 94 



HARD-HEADED PERSONS 



This man's interest in life was oil. It oozed from 
the ventages of his talk. If he looked on the map of 
this fair world, with its mountains like caterpillars 
dozing on the page — for so do maps present them- 
selves to my fancy — he would see merely the blue- 
print and huge specification of oil production and 
consumption. The dotted cities would suggest no 
more than agencies in its distribution, and they would 
be pegged in many colors — as is the custom of our 
business efficiency — by way of base symbolism of 
their rank and pretense; the wide oceans themselves 
would be merely courses for his tank ships to bustle 
on and leave a greasy trail. Really, contrary to my 
own experience and sudden cure, one might think 
that such an oleaginous stream of talk, if directed in 
atomizer fashion against the nostrils of the listener, 
would serve as a healing emulsion for the complaint 
I then suffered with. 

Be these things as they may, what I can actually 
vouch for is that when this fellow had set himself 
and opened a vollej^ of facts on me, I was shamed to 
silence. There was a spaciousness, a planetary sweep 
and glittering breadth that shriveled me. The com- 
modity which I dispensed was but used around the 
corner, with a key turned upon it at the shadowy end 
of day against its intrusion on the night. But his oil, 
all day long and all night too, was swishing in its 

95 



:s3»s 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



tanks on the course to Zanzibar. And all the fretted 
activity of the earth was tributary to his purpose. 
How like an untrimmed smoky night-candle did my 
ambition burn! If I chanced to think in thousands 
it was a strain upon me. My cerebrum must have 
throbbed itself to pieces upon the addition of another 
cypher. But he marshaled his legions and led them 
up and down, until it dazed me. I was no better than 
some cobbler with a fiddle, crooked and intent to the 
twanging of his E string, while the great Napoleon 
thundered by. 

The secret channels of the earth and the fullness 
thereof made a joyful gurgle in his thoughts. And 
if he ever wandered in the country and ever saw a 
primrose on the river's brim — which I consider 
unlikely, his attention being engaged at the moment 
on figuring the cost of oil barrels, with special consid- 
eration for the price of bungs — if this man ever did 
see a primrose, would it have been a yellow primrose 
to him and nothing more? Bless your dear eyes, it 
would have been a compound of by-products — para- 
fine, wax-candles, cup-grease, lamp-black, beeswax 
and peppermint drops — not to mention its proper 
distillation into such rare odors as might be sold at 
so much a bottle to jobbers, and a set price at retail, 
with best legal talent to avoid the Sherman Act. 

96 



HARD-HEADED PERSONS 



This man has lived — my spleen rises at the 
thought — in many of the capitals of Europe. For 
six months at a time he has walked around one end 
of the Louvre on his way home at night without once 
putting his head inside. Indeed, it is probable he 
hasn't noticed the building, or if he has, thinks it is an 
arsenal. Now in all humility, and unbuttoned, as it 
were, for a spanking by whomsoever shall wish to 
give it, I must confess that I myself have no great 
love for the Louvre, regarding it somewhat as an 
endurance test for tired tourists, a kind of blow-in- 
the-nozzle-and-watch-the-dial-mount-up contrivance, 
as at a country fair. And so I am not sure but that 
the band playing in the gardens is a better amuse- 
ment for a bright afternoon, and that a nursemaid 
in uniform with her children — bare-legged tots with 
fingers in the sand — that such sight is more worthy 
of respect than a dead Duchess painted on the wall. 
It is but a ritualistic obeisance I have paid the gods 
inside. My finer reverence has been for benches in 
the sun and the vagabondage of a bus-top. 

If ever my friend gets to heaven it will be but 
another point for exportation. How closely he will 
listen for any squeaking of the Pearly Gates, with a 
nostrum ready for their dry complaint! When he is 
once through and safe (the other pilgrims still 
coming up the hill — for heaven, I'm sure, will be set 

97 



.:i**^ 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



on some wind-swept ridge, with purple distance in 
the valleys — ) how he will put his ear against the 
hinge for nice diagnosis as to the weight of oil that 
will give best result! How he will wink upon the 
gateman that he write his order large! 

Reader, I have sent you off upon a wrong direction. 
I have twisted the wooden finger at the crossroads. 
The man of oil does not exist. He is a piece of fiction 
with which to point a moral. Pig-iron or cotton-cloth 
would have served as well ; anything, in fact, whereon, 
by too close squinting, one may blunt his sight. 

We have all observed a growing tendency in many 
persons to put, as it were, electric lights in all the 
corners and attics of their brains, until it is too much 
a rarity to find any one who will admit a twilight in 
his whole establishment. This is carrying mental 
housekeeping too far. I will confess that I prefer a 
light at the foot of the back stairs, where the steps 
are narrow at the turn, for Annie is precious to us. 
I will confess, also, that it is well to have a switch in 
the kitchen to throw light in the basement, on the 
chance that the wood-box may get empty before the 
evening has spent itself. There is comfort, too, in not 
being forced to go darkling to bed, like Childe Roland 
to the tower, but to put out the light from the floor 
above. But we are carrying this business too far in 
mental concerns. Here is properly a place for a rare 

98 



HARD-HEADED PERSONS 



twilight. It is not well that a man should always 
flare himself like a lighted ballroom. 

Much of our best mental stuff — if you exclude the 
harsher grindings of our business hours — fades in too 
coarse a light. 'Tis a brocade that for best preserva- 
tion must not be hung always in the sun. There must 
be regions in you unguessed at — cornered and shad- 
owed places — recesses to be shown at peep of finger 
width, yielding only to the knock of fancy, dim 
sequesterings tucked obscurely from the noises of the 
world, where one must be taken by the hand and 
led — dusky closets beyond the common use. It is in 
such places — your finger on your lips and your feet 
a-tiptoe on the stairs — that you will hide away from 
baser uses the stowage of moonlight stuff and such 
other gaseous and delightful foolery as may lie in 
your inheritance. 




99 



HOOP5K.IKJ5 &^ OTHER, 
LIVELY MATTEIV^ 




HOOPSWPJrS fr OTHER, 
LIVELY MATTEIVj SEB 



Several months ago I had occasion to go through 
a deserted "mansion." It was a gaunt building with 
long windows and it sat in a great yard. Over the 
windows were painted scrolls, like eyebrows lifted 
in astonishment. Whatever was the cause of this, it 
has long since departed, for it is thirty years since 
the building was tenanted. It would seem as if it 
fell asleep — for so the blinds and the drawn curtains 
attest — before the lines of this first astonishment 
were off its face. I am told that the faces of men 

103 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



dead in battle show in similar fashion the marks of 
conflict. But there is a shocked expression on the 
face of this house as if a scandal were on the street. 
It is crying, as it were, "Fie, shame!" upon its 
neighbors. 

Inside there are old carpets and curtains which spit 
dust at you if you touch them. (Is there not some 
fabulous animal which does the same, thereby to 
escape in the mirk it has itself created?) Most of the 
furniture has been removed, but here and there bulky 
pieces remain, an antique sideboard, maybe too large 
to be taken away; like Robinson Crusoe's boat, too 
heavy to be launched. In each room is a chandelier 
for gas, resplendent as though Louis XV had come 
again to life, with tinkling glass pendants and 
globules interlinked, like enormous Kohinoors. 

Down in the kitchen — which is below stairs as in 
an old English comedy — you can see the place where 
the range stood. And there are smoky streaks upon 
the walls that may have come from the coals of 
ancient feasts. If you sniff, and put your fancy in 
it — it is an unsavory thought — it is likely even that 
you can get the stale smell from such hospitable 
preparation. 

From the first floor to the second is a flaring stair- 
case with a landing where opulence can get its 
breath. And then there is a choice of upward steps, 

104 



HOOPSKIRTS AND OTHER LIVELY MATTER 

either to the right or left as your wish shall direct. 
And on each side is a balustrade unbroken by posts 
from top to bottom. Now the first excitement of my 
own life was on such a rail, which seemed a funicular 
made for my special benefit. The seats of all my 
early breeches, I have been told, were worn shiny 
thereon, like a rubbed apple. These descents were 
executed slowly at the turn, but gathered wild speed 
on the straight-away. There was slight need for 
Annie to dust the "balusters." 

An old house is strong in its class distinctions. 
There is a front part and a back part. To know the 
front part is to know it in its spacious and generous 
moods. But somewhere you will find a door and 
there will be three steps behind it, and poof! — you 
will be prying into the darker life of the place. In 
this particular house of which I write, it was as if the 
back rooms, the back halls and the innumerable 
closets had been playing at hide and seek and had 
not been told when the game was over, and so still 
kept to their hiding places. It is in such obscure 
closets that a family skeleton, if it be kept at all, 
might be kept most safely. There would be slight 
hazard of its discovery if the skeleton restrained 
itself from clanking, as is the whim of skeletons. 

It was in the back part of this house that I came 
on a closet, where, after all these years, women's 

105 — 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



garments were still hanging. A lighted match — for 
I am no burglar with a bull's-eye as you might sus- 
pect — displayed to me an array of petticoats — ^the 
flounced kind that gladdened the eye of woman in 
those remote days — also certain gauzy matters which 
the writers of the eighteenth century called by the 
name of smocks. Besides these, there were suspended 
from hooks those sartorial deceits, those lying mounds 
of fashion, that false incrustation on the surface of 
nature, known as "bustles." Also, there was a hoop- 
skirt curled upon the floor, and an open barrel with 
a stowage of books — a novel or two of E. P. Roe, 
the poems of John Saxe, a table copy of Whittier 
in padded leather, an album with a flourish on the 
cover — these at the top of the heap. 

I choose to trace the connection between the styles 
of dress and books, and— where my knowledge 
serves — ^to show the effect of political change on both. 
For it is written that when Constantinople fell in 
the fifteenth century Turkish costumes became the 
fashion through western Europe — maybe a flash of 
eastern color across the shoulders or an oriental buckle 
for the shoes. Similarly the Balkan War gave us 
hints for dress. Many styles to-day are marks of 
our kinship with the East. These are mere broken 
promptings for your own elaboration. And it seems 
to sort with this theory of close relation, that the 

106 



HOOPSKIRTS AND OTHER LIVELY MATTER 

generation which flared and flounced its person until 
nature was no more than a kernel in the midst, which 
puffed itself like a muffin with but a finger-point of 
dough within, should be the generation that particu- 
larly delighted in romantic literature, in which like- 
wise nature is so prudently wrapped that scarce an 
ankle can show itself. It would be a nice inquiry 
whether the hoopskirt was not introduced — it was 
midway in the eighteenth century, I think — at the 
time of the first budding of romantic sentiment. The 
"Man of Feeling" came after and Anne Radcliffe's 
novels. Is it not significant also, in these present 
days of Russian novels and naked realism, that 
costume should advance sympathetically to the edge 
of modesty? 




There is something, however, to be said in favor 
of romantic books, despite the horrible examples at 
the top of this barrel. Perhaps our own literature 



107 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



shivers in too thin a shift. For once upon a time 
somewhere between the age of bustles and ourselves 
there were writers who ended their stories "and they 
were married and lived happily ever after." Whereas 
at this present day stories are begun "They were 
married and straightway things began to go to the 
devil." And for my own part I have read enough 
of family quarrels. I am tired of the tune upon the 
triangle and I am ready for softer flutings. When 
I visit my neighbors, I want them to make a decent 
pretense. It was Charles Lamb who found his 
married friends too loving in his presence, but let us 
not go to extremes ! And so, after I have read a few 
books of marital complication, I yearn for the old- 
fashioned couple in the older books who went hand 
in hand to old age. At this minute there is a black 
book that looks down upon me like a crow. It is 
"Crime and Punishment." I read it once when I was 
ill, and I nearly died of it. I confess that after a very 
little acquaintance with such books I am tempted to 
sequester them on a top shelf somewhere, beyond 
reach of tiptoe, where they may brood upon their 
banishment and rail against the world. 

Encyclopedias and the tonnage of learning prop- 
erly take their places on the lowest shelves, for their 
lump and mass make a fitting foundation. I must 
say, however, that the habit of the dictionary of 



108 



HOOPSKIRTS AND OTHER LIVELY MATTER 

secreting itself in the darkest corner of the lowest 
shelf contributes to general illiteracy. I have known 
families wrangle for ten minutes on the meaning of 
a word rather than lift this laggard from its depths. 
Be that as it may, the novels and poetry should be 
on the fifth shelf from the bottom, just off the end 
of the nose, so to speak. 

Now, the vinegar cruet is never the largest vessel 
in the house. So by strict analogy, sour books — the 
kind that bite the temper and snarl upon your better 
moods — should be in a small minority. Do not mis- 
take me! I shall find a place, maybe, for a volume 
or two of Nietzsche, and all of Ibsen surely. I would 
admit uplift too, for my taste is catholic. And there 
will be other books of a kind that never rouse a 
chuckle in you. For these are necessary if for no 
more than as alarm clocks to awake us from our 
dreaming self -content. But in the main I would not 
have books too insistent upon the wrongs of the world 
and the impossibility of remedy. 

I confess to a liking for tales of adventure, for 
wrecks in the South Seas, for treasure islands, for 
pirates with red shirts. Mark you, how a red shirt 
lights up a dull page! It is like a scarlet leaf on a 
gray November day. Also I have a weakness for the 
bang of pistols, round oaths and other desperate ras- 
cality. In such stories there is no small mincing. A 

109 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



villain proclaims himself on his first appearance — 
unless John Silver be an exception — and retains his 
villainy until the rope tightens about his neck in the 
last chapter but one; the very last being set aside for 
the softer commerce of the hero and heroine. 

You will remember that about twenty years ago a 
fine crop of such stories came out of the Balkans. 
At that time it was a dim, unknown land, a kind of 
noveUsts' Coast of Bohemia, an appropriate setting 
for distressed princesses. I'll hazard a guess that 
there was not a peak in all that district on which 
there was not some Black Rudolph's castle, not a road 
that did not clack romantically with horses' hoofs 
on bold adventure. But the wars have changed all 
this by bringing too sharp a light upon the dim 
scenery of this pageantry, and swash-bucklery is all 
but dead. 

To confess the truth, it is in such stories that I like 
horses best. In real life I really do not like them at 
all. I am rather afraid of them as of strange organ- 
isms that I can neither start with ease nor stop with 
safety. It is not that I never rode or drove a horse. 
I have achieved both. But I don't urge him to 
deviltrj^ Instead I humor his whims. Some horses 
even I might be fond of. Give me a horse that nears 
the age of slippered pantaloon and is, moreover, 
phlegmatic in his tastes, and then, as the stories say 

110 



HOOPSKIRTS AND OTHER LIVELY MATTER 

"with tightened girth and feet well home" — but 
enough ! I must not be led into boasting. 

But in these older stories I love a horse. With 
what fire do his hoofs ring out in the flight of elope- 
ment! "Pursuit's at the turn. Speed my brave 
Dobbin!" And when the Prince has kissed the 
Princess' hand, you know that the story is nearly over 
and that they will live happily ever after. Of course 
there is always someone to suggest that Cinderella 
was never happy after she left her ashes and pump- 
kins and went to live in the palace. But this is idle 
gossip. Even if there were "occasional bickerings" 
between her and the Prince, this is as Lamb says it 
should be among "near relations." f 

I nearly died of "Crime and Punishment." These 
Russian novelists have too distressful a point of view. « ) 

They remind me too painfully of the poem — 

It was dreadful dark 
In that doleful ark 
When the elephants went to bed. 

Doubtless if the lights burn high in you, it is well to 
read such gloom as is theirs. Perhaps they depict 
life. These things may be true and if so, we ought 
to know them. At the best, theirs is a real attempt 
"to cleanse the foul body of the infected world." But 
if there be a blast without and driving rain, must we 

Ill 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



be always running to the door to get it in our face? 
Will not one glance in the evening be enough? Shall 
we be always exposing ourselves "to feel what 
wretches feel"? It is true that we are too content 
under the suffering of others, but it is true, also, that 
too few of us were born under a laughing star. Gray 
shadows fall too often on our minds. A sunny road 
is the best to travel by. Furthermore — and here is 
a deep platitude — there is many a man who sobs upon 
a doleful book, who to the end of time will blithely 
underpay his factory girls. His grief upon the book 
is diffuse. It ranges across the mountains of the 
world, but misses the nicer point of his own conduct. 
Is this not sentimentally like the gray yarn hysteria 
under the spell of which wealthy women clicked their 
needles in public places for the soldiers ? Let me not 
underrate the number of garments that they made — 
surely a single machine might produce as many 
within a week. But there is danger that their work 
was only a sentimental expression of their world- 
grief. Ill sink to depths of practicality and claim 
that a pittance from their allowances would have 
bought more and better garments in the market. 

Perhaps we read too many tragical books. In the 
decalogue the inheritance of evil is too strongly visited 
on the children to the third and fourth generation, 
and there is scant sanction as to the inheritance of 

112 



HOOPSKIRTS AND OTHER LIVELY MATTER 

goodness. It is the sins of the fathers that hve in the 
children. It is the evil that men do that lives after 
them, while the good, alas, is oft interred with their 
bones. If a doleful book stirs you up to life, for 
God's sake read it! If it wraps you all about as in 
a winding sheet for death, you had best have none 
of it. 




I had now burned several matches — and my fingers 
too — ^in the inspection of the closet where the women's 
garments hung. And it came on me as I poked the 
books within the barrel and saw what silly books 
were there, that perhaps I have overstated my posi- 
tion. It would be a lighter doom, I thought, to be 

113 — _ — — _. 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



rived and shriveled by the lightning flash of a modern 
book, even "Crime and Punishment," than stultified 
by such as were within. 

Then, like the lady of the poem 

Having sat me down upon a mound 
To think on life, 

I concluded that my views were sound 
And got me up and turned me round, 
And went me home again. 



114 



ON TRAVELING m> 




ON TRAVELING 



?S> 



In old literature life was compared to a journey, 
and wise men rejoiced to question old men because, 
like travelers, they knew the sloughs and roughnesses 
of the long road. Men arose with the sun, and 
toddled forth as children on the day's journey of 
their lives, and became strong to endure the heaviness 
of noonday. They strived forward during the hours 
of early afternoon while their sun's ambition was hot, 
and then as the heat cooled they reached the crest 
of the last hill, and their road dipped gently to the 
valley where all roads end. And on into the quiet 
evening, until, at last, they lie down in that shadowed 
valley, and await the long night. 



117 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



This figure has lost its meaning, for we now travel 
by rail, and life is expressed in terms of the railway- 
time-table. As has been said, we leave and arrive 
at places, but we no longer travel. Consequently 
we cannot understand the hubbub that Marco 
Polo must have caused among his townsmen when 
he swaggered in. He and his crew were bronzed by 
the sun, were dressed as Tartars, and could speak 
their native Italian with difficulty. To convince the 
Venetians of their identity, Marco gave a magnificent 
entertainment, at which he and his officers received, 
clad in oriental dress of red satin. Three times 
during the banquet they changed their dress, dis- 
tributing the discarded garments among their guests. 
At last, the rough Tartar clothing worn on their 
travels was displayed and then ripped open. Within 
was a profusion of jewels of the Orient, the gifts of 
Kublai Khan of Cathay. The proof was regarded 
as perfect, and from that time Marco was acknowl- 
edged by his countrymen, and loaded with distinc- 
tion. When Drake returned from the Straits of 
Magellan and, powdered and beflunkied, told his lies 
at fashionable London dinners, no doubt he was 
believed. And his crew, let loose on the beer-shops, 
gathered each his circle of listeners, drank at his 
admirers' expense, and yarned far into the night. 

118 



ON TRAVELING 



It was worth one's while to be a traveler in those 
times. 

But traveling has fallen to the yellow leaf. The 
greatest traveler is now the brakeman. Next is he 
who sells colored cotton. A poor third pursues health 
and flees from restlessness. Wise men have ceased 
to question travelers, except to inquire of the arrival 
of trains and of the comfort of hotels. 

To-day I am a thousand miles from home. From 
my window the world stretches massive, homewards. 
Even though I stood on the most distant range of 
mountains and looked west, still I would look on a 
world that contained no suggestion of home; and if 
I leaped to that horizon and the next, the result would 
be the same — so insignificant would be the relative 
distance accomplished. And here I am set down with 
no knowledge of how I came. There was a con- 
tinuous jar and the noise of motion. We passed a 
barn or two, I believe, and on one hillside animals 
were frightened from their grazing as we passed. 
There were the cluttered streets of several cities and 
villages. There was a prodigious number of tele- 
graph poles going in the opposite direction, hell-bent 
as fast as we, which poles considerately went at half 
speed through towns, for fear of hitting children. 
The United States was once an immense country, and 
extended quite to the sunset. For convenience we 

119 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



have reduced its size, and made it but a map of its 
former self. Any section of this map can be unrolled 
and inspected in a day's time. 

In the books for children is the story of the seven- 
league boots — wonderful boots, worth a cobbler's 
fortune. If a prince is escaping from an ogre, if he 
is eloping with a princess, if he has an engagement 
at the realm's frontier and the wires are down, he 
straps these boots to his feet and strides the moun- 
tains and spans the valleys. For with the clicking 
of the silver buckles he has destroyed the dimensions 
of space. Length, breadth and depth are measured 
for him but in wishes. One wish and perhaps a 
snap of the fingers, or an invocation to the devil of 
locomotion, and he stands on a mountain-top, the 
next range of hills blue in the distance; another wish 
and another snap and he has leaped the valley. 
Wonderful boots, these! Worth a king's ransom. 
And this prince, too, as he travels thus dizzily may 
remember one or two barns, animals frightened from 
their grazing, and the cluttered streets nested in the 
valley. When he reaches his journey's end he will 
be just as wise and just as ignorant as we who now 
travel by rail in magic, seven-league fashion. For 
here I am set down, and all save the last half-mile of 
my path is lost in the curve of the mountains. From 
my window I see the green-covered mountains, so 

120 



^ 



ON TRAVELING 



different from city streets with their horizon of 
buildings. 

I fancy that, on the memorable morning when 
Aladdin's Palace was set down in Africa after its 
magic night's ride from the Chinese capital, a house- 
maid must have gone to the window, thrown back 
the hangings and looked out, astounded, on the barren 
mountains, when she expected to see only the court- 
yard of the palace and its swarm of Chinese life. 
She then recalled that the building rocked gently in 
the night, and that she heard a whirling sound as of 
wind. These were the only evidences of the devil- 
guided flight. Now she looked on a new world, and 
the familiar pagodas lay far to the east within the 
eye of the rising sun. 

There are summer evenings in my recollection when 
I have traveled the skies, landing from the sky's blue 
sea upon the cloud continent, and traversing its 
mountain ranges, its inland lakes, harbors and valleys. 
Over the wind-swept ridges I have gone, watching 
the world-change, seeing 

the hungry ocean gain 
Advantage on the Kingdom of the shore, 
And the firm soil win of the watery main^ 
Increasing store with loss and loss with store. 

The greatest traveler that I know is a little man, 
slightly bent, who walks with a stick in his garden 

121 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



or sits passive in his library. Other friends have 1 

boasted of travels in the Orient, of mornings spent 
on the Athenian Acropolis, of visiting the Theatre of 
Dionysius, and of hallooing to the empty seats that 
re-echoed. They warn me of this and that hotel, and 
advise me concerning the journey from London. The 
usual tale of travelers is that Athens is a ruin. I 
have heard it rumored, for instance, that the Parthe- 
non marbles are in London, and that the Parthenon 
itself has suffered from the "wreckful siege of batter- 
ing days"; that the walls to Piraeus contain hardly 
one stone left upon another. 

And this sets me to thinking, for my friend denies 
all this with such an air of sincerity that I am almost 
inclined to believe his word against all the others. 
The Athens he pictures is not ruinous. The Par- 
thenon stands before him as it left the hand of 
Phidias. The walls to Piraeus stand high as on that 
morning, now almost forgotten, when Athens awaited 
the Spartan attack. For him the Dionysian Theatre 
does not echo to tourists' shouts, but gives forth the 
sounds of many-voiced Greek life. He knows, too, 
the people of Athens. He walked one day with 
Socrates along the banks of the Ilissus, and after- 
wards visited him in his prison when about to drink 
the hemlock. It is of the grandeur of Athens and her 
sons that he speaks, not of her ruins. The best of his 

, J22 



ON TRAVELING 



travels is that he buys no tickets of Cook, nor, indeed, 
of any one, and when he has seen the cities' sights, his 
wife enters and says, "Isn't it time for the bookworm 
to eat?" So he has his American supper in the next 
room overlooking Attica, so to speak. 




123 



THKOUGH T£ 5CUTTLE 
WITH THE TINMAN m 




THKOUGH TE 5CUTTLE 
WITH THE TINMAN M 

Yesterday I was on the roof with the tinman. He 
did not resemble the tinman of the "Wizard of Oz" 
or the flaming tinman of "Lavengro," for he wore 
a derby hat, had a shiny seat, and smoked a ragged 
cigar. It was a flue he was fixing, a thing of metal 
for the gastronomic whiffs journeying from the 
kitchen to the upper airs. There was a vent through 
the roof with a cone on top to shed the rain. I 
watched him from the level cover of a second-story 
porch as he scrambled up the shingles. I admire men 
who can climb high places and stand upright and 

127 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



unmoved at the gutter's edge. But their bravado 
forces on me unpleasantly how closely I am tied 
because of dizziness to Mother Earth's apron strings. 
These fellows who perch on scaffolds and flaunt them- 
selves on steeple tops are frontiersmen. They stand 
as the outposts of this flying globe. Often when I 
observe a workman descend from his eagle's nest in 
the open steel frame of a lofty building, I look into 
his face for some trace of exaltation, some message 
from his wider horizon. You may remember how 
they gazed into Alcestis' face when she returned 
from the House of Hades, that they might find there 
a token of her shadowed journey. It is lucky that 
I am no taller than six feet; if ten, giddiness would 
set in and reversion to type on all fours. An undiz- 
zied man is to me as much of a marvel as one who in 
his heart of hearts is not afraid of a horse. 

Maybe after all, it is just because I am so cowardly 
and dizzy that I have a liking for high places and 
especially for roofs. Although here my people have 
lived for thousands of years on the very rim of 
things, with the unimagined miles above them and the 
glitter of Orion on their windows, so little have I 
learned of these verities that I am frightened on my 
shed top and the grasses below make me crouch in 
terror. And yet to my fearful perceptions there 
may be pleasures that cannot exist for the accus- 

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THROUGH THE SCUTTLE WITH THE TINMAN 

tomed and jaded senses of the tinman. Could he feel 
stimulus in Hugo's description of Paris from the 
towers of Notre Dame ? He is too much the gargoyle 
himself for the delights of dizziness. 

Quite a little could be said about the creative power 
of gooseflesh. If Shakespeare had been a tinman he 
could not have felt the giddy height and grandeur 
of the Dover Cliffs; Ibsen could not have wrought 
the climbing of the steeple into the crisis and calamity 
of "The Master Builder"; Teufelsdrockh could not 
have uttered his extraordinary night thoughts above 
the town of Weissnichtwo ; "Prometheus Bound" 
would have been impossible. Only one with at least 
a dram of dizziness could have conceived an "eagle- 
baffling mountain, black, wintry, dead, unmeasured." 
In the days when we read Jules Verne, was not our 
chief pleasure found in his marvelous way of suspend- 
ing us with swimming senses over some fearful abyss ; 
wet and slippery crags maybe, and void and blackness 
before us and below; and then just to give full meas- 
ure of fright, a sound of running water in the depths. 
Doesn't it raise the hair? Could a tinman have 
written it? 

But even so, I would like to feel at home on my 
own roof and have a slippered familiarity with my 
slates and spouts. A chimney-sweep in the old days 
doubtless had an ugly occupation, and the fear of a 

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JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



sooty death must have been recurrent to him. But 
what a sable triumph was his when he had cleared his 
awful tunnel and had emerged into daylight, bloom- 
ing, as Lamb would say, in his first tender nigritude ! 
"I seem to remember," he continues, "that a bad 
sweep was once left in a stack with his brush to indi- 
cate which way the wind blew." After observing the 
tinman for a while, I put on rubber shoes and slunk 
up to the ridgepole, the very watershed of my sixty- 
foot kingdom, my legs slanting into the infinities of 
the North and South. It sounds unexciting when 
written, but there I was, astride my house, up among 
the vents and exhausts of my former cloistered lifcj 
my head outspinning the weathercock. My Matter- 
horn had been climbed, "the pikes of darkness named 
and stormed." Next winter when I sit below snug 
by the fire and hear the wind funneling down the 
chimney, will not my peace be deeper because I have 
known the heights where the tempest blows, and the 
rain goes pattering, and the whirling tin cones go 
mad? 

Right now, if I dared, I would climb to the roof 
again, and I would sit with my feet over the edge and 
crane forward and do crazy things just because I 
could. Then maybe my neighbors would mistake the 
point of my philosophy and lock me up; would 
sympathize with my fancies as did Sir Toby and 

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THROUGH THE SCUTTLE WITH THE TINMAN 



Maria with Malvolio. If one is to escape bread and 
water in the basement, one's opinions on such sHght 
things as garters and roofs must be kept dark. Be 
a freethinker, if you will, on the devil, the deep sea, 
and the sunrise, but repress yourself in the trifles. 

I like flat roofs. There is in my town a public 
library on the top story of a tall building, and on my 
way home at night I often stop to read a bit before 
its windows. When my eyes leave my book and 
wander to the view of the roofs, I fancy that the giant 
hands of a phrenologist are feeling the buildings which 
are the bumps of the city. And listening, I seem to 
hear his dictum "Vanity" ; for below is the market of 
fashion. The world has sunk to ankle height. I sit 
on the shoulders of the world, above the tar-and- 
gravel scum of the city. And at my back are the 
books — the past, all that has been, the manners of 
dress and thought — they too peeping aslant through 
these windows. Soon it will be dark and this day also 
will be done and burn its ceremonial candles ; and the 
roar from the pavement will be the roar of yesterday. 

Astronomy would have come much later if it had 
not been for the flat roofs of the Orient and its glis- 
tening nights. In the cloudy North, where the roofs 
were thatched or peaked, the philosophers slept 
indoors tucked to the chin. But where the nights 
were hot, men, banished from sleep, watched the 

131 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



rising of the stars that they might point the hours. 
They studied the recurrence of the star patterns until 
they knew when to look for their reappearance. It 
was under a cloudless, breathless sky that the con- 
stellations were named and their measures and orbits 
allotted. On the flat roof of some Babylonian temple 
of Bel came into life astrology, "foolish daughter of 
a wise mother," that was to bind the eyes of the world 
for nearly two thousand years, the most enduring and 
the strongest of superstitions. It was on these roofs, 
too, that the planets were first maligned as wanderers, 
celestial tramps; and this gossip continued until 
recent years when at last it appeared that they are 
bodies of regular and irreproachable habits, eccentric 
in appearance only, doing a cosmic beat with a time- 
clock at each end, which they have never failed to 
punch at the proper moment. 

Somewhere, if I could but find it, must exist a diary 
of one of these ancient astronomers — and from it I 
quote in anticipation. "Early this night to my roof," 
it runs, "the heavens being bare of clouds {coelo 
aperto). Set myself to measure the elevation of 
Sagittarius Alpha with my new astrolabe sent me by 
my friend and master, Hafiz, from out Arabia. Did 
this night compute the equation a=^f(a, b c Ts). 
Thus did I prove the variations of the ellipse and 

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THROUGH THE SCUTTLE WITH THE TINMAN 

show Hassan Sabah to be the mule he is. Then 
rested, pacing my roof even to the rising of the morn- 
ing star, which burned red above the Sultan's turret. 
To bed, satisfied with this night." 

Northern literature has never taken the roof 
seriously. There have been many books written from 
the viewpoint of windows. The study window is 
usual. Then there is the college window and the 
Thrums window. Also there is a window viewpoint 
as yet scarcely expressed; that of the boy of Steven- 
son's poems with his nose flattened against the 
glass — convalescence looking for sailormen with one 
leg. What is "Un Philosophe sous les Toits" but 
a garret and its prospect? But does Souvestre ever 
go up on the roof? He contents himself with open- 
ing his casement and feeding crumbs to the birds. 
Not once does he climb out and scramble around the 
mansard. On wintry nights neither his legs nor 
thoughts join the windy devils that play tempest 
overhead. Then again, from Westminster bridges, 
from country lanes, from crowded streets, from ships 
at sea, and mountain tops have sonnets been thrown 
to the moon ; not once from the roof. 

Is not this neglect of the roof the chief reason why 
we Northerners fear the night? When darkness is 
concerned, the cowardice of our poetry is notorious. 
It skulks, so to speak, when beyond the glare of the 

133 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



street lights. I propound it as a question for 
scholars. 

'Tis now the very witching time of night, 

When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out 

Contagion to this world. 

Why is the night conceived as the time for the bogey 
to be abroad? — an 

. . . evil thing that walks by night, 
In fog or fire, by lake or moorish fen, 
Blue meager hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost 
That breaks his magic chains at curfew time. 

Why does not this slender, cerulean dame keep 
normal hours and get sleepy after dinner with the 
rest of us — and so to bed? Such a baneful thing is 
night, "hideous," reeking with cold shivers and gloom, 
from which morning alone gives relief. 

Pack, clouds, away! and welcome, day! 
With night we banish sorrow. 

Day is jocund that stands on the misty mountain 
tops. 

But we cannot expect the night to be friendly and 
wag its tail when we slam against it our doors and, 
until lately, our windows. Naturally it takes to 
ghoulishness. It was in the South where the roofs 
are flat and men sleep as friends with the night that 

134 



THROUGH THE SCUTTLE WITH THE TINMAN 



it was written, "The heavens declare the glory of 
God: and the firmament showeth his handiwork." 

I get full of my subject as I write and a kind of 
rage comes over me as I think of the wrongs the roof 
has suffered. It is the only part of the house that 
has not kept pace with the times. To say that you 
have a good roof is taken as meaning that your roof 
is tight, that it keeps out the water, that it excels in 
those qualities in which it excelled equally three thou- 
sand years ago. What you ought to mean is that 
you have a roof that is flat and has things on it that 
make it livable, where you can walk, disport yourself, 
or sleep ; a house-top view of your neighbors' affairs ; 
an airy pleasance with a full sweep of stars; a place 
to listen of nights to the drone of the city; a 
place of observation, and if you are so inclined, of 
meditation. 

Everything but the roof has been improved. The 
basement has been coddled with electric lights until 
a coal hole is no longer an abode of mystery. Even 
the garret, that used to be but a dusty suburb of the 
house and lumber room for early Victorian furniture, 
has been plastered and strewn with servants' bed- 
rooms. 

There was a garret once : somewhat misty now after 
these twenty years. It was not daubed to respecta- 
bility with paint, nor was it furnished forth as bed- 

135 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



rooms; but it was rough- timbered, and resounded 
with drops when the dark clouds passed above. On 
bright days a cheerful light lay along the floor and 
dust motes danced in its luminous shaft. And 
always there was cobwebbed stillness. But on dark 
days, when the roof pattered and the branches of 
trees scratched the shingles and when windows 
rattled, a deeper obscurity crept out of the corners. 
Yet was there little fear in the place. This was the 
front garret where the theatre was, with the practi- 
cable curtain. But when the darker mood was on 
us, there was the back garret. It was six steps lower 
and over it the roof crouched as if to hide its secrets. 
The very men that built it must have been lowering, 
bearded fellows; for they put into it many corners 
and niches and black holes. The wood, too, from 
which it was fashioned must have been gnarled and 
knotted and the nails rusty and crooked. One win- 
dow cast a narrow light down the middle of this 
room, but at both sides was inmieasurable night. 
When you had stooped in from the sunlight and had 
accustomed your eyes to the dimness, you found your- 
self in an uncertain anchorage of old furniture, 
abandoned but offering dusty covert for boys with 
the light of brigands in their eyes. A pirates' den 
lay safe behind the chimney, protected by a bristling 
thicket of chairs and table legs, to be approached 

136 



THROUGH THE SCUTTLE WITH THE TINMAN 

only on hands and knees after divers rappings. And 
back there in the dark were strange boxes — strange 
boxes, stout and securely nailed. But the garret has 
gone. 

Whither have the pirates fled? Maybe some rumor 
of the great change reached them in their fastnesses ; 
and then in the light of early dawn, in single file they 
climbed the ladder, up through the scuttle. And 
straddling the ridgepole with daggers between their 
teeth, alas, they became dizzy and toppled down the 
steep shingles to the gutter, to be whirled away in the 
torrent of an April shower. Ah me! Had only the 
roof been flat! Then it would have been for them a 
reservation where they might have lived on and 
waited for the sound of children's feet to come again. 
Then when those feet had come and the old life had 
returned, then from aloft you would hear the old cry 
of Ship-ahoy, and you would know that at last your 
house had again slipped its moorings and was off to 
Madagascar or the Straits. 

Where shall we adventure, to-day that we're afloat, 
Wary of the weather and steering by a star? 
Shall it be to Africa, asteering of the boat, 
To Providence, or Babylon, or off to Malabar? 

So a roof must be more than a cover. The roof of 
a boat, its deck, is arranged for occupation and is its 

isr 



JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



best part. Consider the omnibus! Even it has seats 
on top, the best seats in fine weather. When Martin 
Chuzzlewit went up to London it was on the top of 
the coach he sat. Pickwick betook himself, gaiters, 
small-clothes, and all, to the roof. Even the immacu- 
late RoUo scorned the inside seats. He sat on top, 
you may remember, and sucked oranges to ward off 
malaria, he and that prince of roisterers, Uncle 
George. De Quincey is the authority on mail coaches 
and for the roof seats he is all fire and enthusiasm. 
It happened once, to continue with De Quincey, that 
a state coach was presented by His Majesty George 
the Third of England, as a gift to the Chinese 
Emperor. This kind of vehicle being unknown in 
Peking, "it became necessary to call a cabinet council 
on the grand state question, *Where was the Emperor 
to sit?' The hammer cloth happened to be unusually 
gorgeous ; and partly on that consideration, but partly 
also because the box offered the most elevated seat, 
was nearest the moon, and undeniably went foremost, 
it was resolved by acclamation that the box was the 
Imperial throne, and for the scoundrel who drove, 
he could sit where he could find a perch." 

Consider that the summer day has ended and that 
you are tired with its rush and heat. Up you must 
climb to your house-roof. On the rim of the sky is 
the blurred light from the steel furnaces at the city's 

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THROUGH THE SCUTTLE WITH THE TINMAN 

edge and, paneling this, stands a line of poplars 
stirring and sounding in the night wind. 

Alone upon the house-top to the North 

I turn and watch the lightnings in the sky. 

Is it fanciful to think that into the mind comes a little 
of the beauty of the older world when roofs were flat 
and men meditated under the stars and saw visions 
in the night? 

Once upon a time I crossed the city of Nuremberg 
after dark; the market cleared of all traces of its 
morning sale, the "Schoner Brunnen" at its edge, the 
narrow defile leading to the citadel, the climb at the 
top. And then I came to an open parade above the 
town — "except the Schlosskirche Weathercock no 
biped stands so high." The night had swept away 
all details of buildings. Nuremberg lay below like 
a dark etching, the centuries folded and creased in 
its obscurities. Then from some gaunt tower came 
a peal of bells, the hour maybe, and then an answering 
peal. "Thus stands the night," they said; "thus stand 
the stars." I was in the presence of Time and its 
black wings were brushing past me. What star was 
in the ascendant, I knew not. And yet in me I felt 
a throb that came by blind, circuitous ways from some 
far-off Chaldean temple, seven-storied in the night. 
In me was the blood of the star-gazer, my emotions 

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JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD 



recalling the rejected beliefs, the signs and wonders 
of the heavens. The waves of old thought had but 
latelv receded from the world ; and I, but a chink and 
hollow on the beach, had caught my drop of the 
ebbing ocean. 



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